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So basically the new GTK is iOS but without the professional designers behind it. What I cannot understand is how Canonical, Red Hat, or some rich SV person ha

So basically the new GTK is iOS but without the professional designers behind it. What I cannot understand is how Canonical, Red Hat, or some rich SV person hasn’t thrown money at the problem and hired a big wig design firm or person to overhaul it all. Johnny Ive is now even available (if he’d take the project). But even going thru a site like dribbble there are so many amazing designers out there. To me it would be a more impressive portfolio piece for a young designer to properly design GTK/Gnome and put it out there for the world. What is stopping this? It can’t be caring with the history of people sharing their themes. Is it just taste / money?

derefr 5y ago
Lots of rich companies threw money at the problem of Linux UI, Linux application packaging+sandboxing, and several other things. The result is the Android OS ecosystem, where each hardware vendor has its own proprietary shell, in capitalist competition with other vendors’ shells. I’m not even saying that that’s a bad thing. As it happens, Android has been generalized and generalized from its original use-case until it is today a quite-workable desktop PC OS.
capableweb 5y ago
Easy for someone who works at Apple to say "just throw money at the problem" while there is so much more to consider. Design as a workflow for Open Source design (as in UI/UX) hasn't even been worked on that much. Ideally, open source contributors work on projects because they care about it, and want to improve it. I'm not sure how many designers are using GTK applications day-to-day to care enough about it to start contributing. There is a learning curve as well on how to contribute to these large projects. It'd be great if it could be solved with just one pass of design work and then it's done, but I'm afraid the task is much bigger than that, and "big wig design firms" are expensive, so are design people as well. Not to mention the other problems around that.
- woah 5y ago
  Inherently, good design requires top down authority to force a consistent look, and implementing it requires a bunch of programmers to spend time on boring work. That just doesn't work well in open source where people only want to work on their own thing, sometimes, and in their own way.
  - capableweb 5y ago
    Same could be same about good software design (as in programming), but we've found to design well written software before in a open source manner, I'm sure we could (if we focus on it) figure out something for UI/UX design as well that works in a open source context. For example, style guides written and enforced by a small team can allow open contributions for the UI design. I think it's mostly that not many have tried to figure out how to organize and actually run large-scale open source design work for UI/UX and that's why we haven't figured it out, I don't think it's "inherently" impossible.
    - lwkl 5y ago
      And look at how these projects are organized. Most of the time it's pretty much top-down with a. It's why we have the term BDFL. > good software design (as in programming) That's the second problem. Most programmers probably know about about how good software design works, but have poor taste and prefer designs that aren't suitable for software that is to be used by non-programmers that want sane defaults that work and don't overwhelm them. Just look at the theming debate. People in software developer forums are mad about it. Most users probably don't even know it exists. They just want settings and a UI that's simple enough for them to understand and allow for some basic settings. So you would have to force volunteers to implement a design that they feel is bad. And you see how a lot of people react to it in the Gnome project where people leave because of it. But at the same time Gnome is a good example of how to do UI/UX for a big open source software project (even if you don't agree with their design decisions).
      - eru 5y ago
        > And look at how these projects are organized. Most of the time it's pretty much top-down with a. It's why we have the term BDFL. To make a more general point: top down leadership is not inherently bad. But in order for this to work well, people need to have the ability to enter and exit a project or polity at will. (See eg how McDonald's doesn't let customers vote what to put on their menu, but customers are free to eat at a competitor or make their own food at home. And compare that with North Korea also not letting citizens vote on their menu. But also taking steps to keep people from switching to a competing provider of government services, like South Korea. Similar also for the Berlin Wall.)
- azinman2 5y ago
  As I mentioned before, Canonical and Red Hat have money and could afford proper designers. Programmers are expensive as well, and they have plenty of those on staff. Someone is putting together standard HIGs for Gnome, writing these standard themes, designing the base apps, etc. So you can't just say it's all decentralized and so there's no hope -- there's a ton of collaboration and top-down work happening with Gnome. Pulling in great UX/UI design talent should be prioritized.
  - audidude 5y ago
    > As I mentioned before, Canonical and Red Hat have money and could afford proper designers. They do employ designers, including for GNOME. You might not like their designs. But to call them anything but proper is pretty mean spirited.
baybal2 5y ago
flukus 5y ago
> So basically the new GTK is iOS but without the professional designers behind it. Professional designers seem to be the ones creating these problems. Back when it was just programmers you could tell a button was a button, a tab was a tab and we didn't hide basic functionality behind a swipe gesture or long press that users were supposed to just know. Now everything is pretty but harder to use.
- warning26 5y ago
  > Back when it was just programmers you could tell a button was a button, a tab was a tab and we didn't hide basic functionality behind a swipe gesture or long press that users were supposed to just know. Keep in mind that programmers also gave us this: http://www.martin-achern.de/wgetgui/images/linux_wgetgui.jpg http://www.martin-achern.de/wgetgui/images/linux_wgetgui.jpg People across all disciplines are capable of making poor design choices
  - userbinator 5y ago
    Keep in mind that programmers also gave us this You're basically proving the point. That is so much clearer and obvious to use than the screenshots in the original article, and it doesn't treat you like an idiot.
    - notriddle 5y ago
      Yes, I know which things are buttons, which things are text entry, and which are checkboxes. This was a strength of early 2000's UI design, and it's a shame that so many applications don't give such clear indicators any more. This application still has an absolutely crap design. * How do I specify where the downloaded data goes? Why are there onscreen options for literally everything else, but not that? * Which text entry fields are disabled, and which ones are enabled? This is something Win95 got right. * What even is "force directories"? And it looks like checkboxes are used for both it and "no directories", so what happens if I check both? * What's the difference between Spider and Recursive? Those sound like the same thing to me, and I know I'm in a pretty elite club just knowing what web spiders are at all. * Are jpeg/gif/etc only used when Reject is turned on, or are they also used when Accept is turned on? * Is the wget-list input field connected to the Input file checkbox? It's right underneath it, and presumably I have to specify the input file somewhere, but the spacing implies it's not. * What's the difference between "quiet" and "non verbose"? What happens if both are turned on? * The rest of the buttons are pretty well labeled, but what's AG? * Does it really need its own quit button? The window manager already provides one.
hiccuphippo 5y ago
I think the problem Gnome, and Microsoft, have is they keep throwing money at designers. So designers keep making designs for the sake of designing. They should stop designing, stick to the design they already have and only do incremental updates when new widgets come out.
- azinman2 5y ago
  It's not like everything was perfect in the past and so we're done. Far from it. Even beyond that, the world is changing. New needs, new expectations, new styles in design. Just like we wouldn't expect cars to be frozen in time in the 1950s, we shouldn't expect UI/UX to be either. Linux DE's have never had a particularly well thought out, well designed look. There's been a lot of themes that people create to mimic other commercial systems out there, but not a lot of very high quality original work going on. Yet we can see plenty of good work technologically. For a long time when it was largely grey beards most people didn't mind so much, but now people expect good design across all products. The standards have risen, and the FOSS world should meet that challenge head on.
  - MichaelBurge 5y ago
    > New needs, new expectations, new styles in design. The article focus on the settings control panel. What new needs and expectations does the new settings control panel in 2022 have compared to 2010?
    - azinman2 5y ago
      The article is really about GTK3 versus GTK4, using the settings pane as an example. My comment is about the larger picture. However, take a look at what it meant to reset your default settings in 2010: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/08/restore-default-gnome-settings-in-ubuntu-quick-tip https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/08/restore-default-gnome-se... Settings panes are still largely confusing on all platforms, commercial included, as you broaden your user base. They've also grown in utility as iOS has pushed the idea of a centralized place for settings for all aspects of the system (apps included), which you're starting to see elements of on other platforms as well. There's plenty of room for improvement, including simplifying everything down so that few settings can make big differences where the heavy lifting is done for you. Linux in particular suffers from this, from a legacy of a million .conf files everywhere that many people blindly copy-pasta'd random configurations they found online (I'm looking at you XFree86).
Flankk 5y ago
Every screenshot in this blog post showcases dated design paradigms. Flat UI was popularized around the release of Windows 10 in 2015. When I go through dribbble I see a lot of mediocre and copycat design. Design is about more than copying what Apple is doing. You're not going to get style from fat guys with ponytails.
skykooler 5y ago
That's sort of what happened with ElementaryOS, isn't it?
- azinman2 5y ago
  Sort of. It largely was a copy of Apple, unfortunately. However I think it at least pushed the bar of what might be possible with Linux, and they're no longer around [1]. I'm hoping someone can come and give real high quality work to the FOSS community and take on a wider perspective. They had to basically do their own thing instead of pushing GNOME/KDE along, which may have to be unfortunately the case. It would be better if we could leverage the existing code bases rather than starting from scratch, but there maybe enough major things that need to change and enough resistance from the existing communities to allow for that to happen. [1] https://lunduke.substack.com/p/elementary-os-is-imploding?s=r https://lunduke.substack.com/p/elementary-os-is-imploding?s=...
  - chillfox 5y ago
    Wut... what, when how??? I love ElementaryOS, it's great, everything just works, I didn't have to tweak a single thing or mess with drivers earlier this year when I installed it on a new laptop that even Mint was having issues with. Going off to read that link now.
    - azinman2 5y ago
      Funny, I tried it last year and keep getting kernel panics. That’s the thing that’s hard about Linux — a million different hardware configurations.
      - chillfox 5y ago
        yep, If you have troublesome hardware then I find the fastest solution is to just cycle through the top 10 distros to see if it works on any of them. If it does then great, you can either stop there or use it as a "guide" for how to get your favorite distro working.
  - 5y ago
harry8 5y ago
If you're Apple and you make your desktop more attractive and pleasant you drive sales and market share. If you're redhat and you resource that you drive market share, to Ubuntu, who I believe still have a policy of never paying for development except for Ubuntu things, eg their failed desktop nobody else would use, Mir, bzr, etc. Is that still the case? It would be a huge disincentive for other distros to contribute to the commons when ubuntu just parasite from it to a big market share.
- simion314 5y ago
  >If you're redhat and you resource that you drive market share, to Ubuntu, who I believe still have a policy of never paying for development except for Ubuntu things, eg their failed desktop nobody else would use, Mir, bzr, etc. Fact check, Gnome was filled of memory leaks and performance issues until some competent Canonical developer started working back on GNOME and fixing them. So while Ubunut was not using GNOME the RH could have safely put their money into GNOME and it would not have benefited Canonical but the reality is that Canonical had to pay competent people to fix GNOME bugs, but probably Canonical can't change the desinger dictator so they usewd for a while a fixed theme and not the shity GNOME default. I disconnected myself from Linux news so I don't know what drama happened in latest 2-3 years.
  - harry8 5y ago
    Who? When? What? They hired Henstridge to work on nothing to do with gnome? Redhat hired a bunch of core gnome devs to work on gnome? No? Happy to find out I'm wrong if there are facts involved...
    - simion314 5y ago
      Are you new to GNOME? this is a few years old when Canonical dropped Unity. What was happening was that each GNOME release fixed some memory leaks but create a few new ones, the lag was terrible and when Canonical moved back to GNOME a Canonical developer started fixing stuff, GNOME devs were blaming the hardware for the bugs or were busy with removing features. https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2019/10/ubuntu-improves-gnome-shell-performance https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2019/10/ubuntu-improves-gnome-sh... you can google the dev "Daniel Van Vugt" and check his work on GNOME, or you can google "GNOME shell memory leak" , as I said I stopped following Linux stuff (I am still a Linux users) and I have no idea what happened in recent years except the major things like GNOME's reset triggering a new fracture in it's community. Anway, Canonical was not using GNOME so RH did not avoided paying for better developers because Canonical would benefit. Later when Canonical decided to use GNOME they fixed the major performance issues and memory leaks and put back some of the features the users wanted but designers refused to provide.
phendrenad2 5y ago
I don't believe that Canonical or Red Hat would make any money from having a better GUI. Most of their (paying) customers are probably just running servers, or maybe running some simple dumb terminals for nontechnical employees (like a Point-of-Sale where the user may open a web browser or something).

derefr 5y ago

Lots of rich companies threw money at the problem of Linux UI, Linux application packaging+sandboxing, and several other things. The result is the Android OS ecosystem, where each hardware vendor has its own proprietary shell, in capitalist competition with other vendors’ shells. I’m not even saying that that’s a bad thing. As it happens, Android has been generalized and generalized from its original use-case until it is today a quite-workable desktop PC OS.

capableweb 5y ago

Easy for someone who works at Apple to say "just throw money at the problem" while there is so much more to consider. Design as a workflow for Open Source design (as in UI/UX) hasn't even been worked on that much. Ideally, open source contributors work on projects because they care about it, and want to improve it. I'm not sure how many designers are using GTK applications day-to-day to care enough about it to start contributing. There is a learning curve as well on how to contribute to these large projects. It'd be great if it could be solved with just one pass of design work and then it's done, but I'm afraid the task is much bigger than that, and "big wig design firms" are expensive, so are design people as well. Not to mention the other problems around that.

woah 5y ago
Inherently, good design requires top down authority to force a consistent look, and implementing it requires a bunch of programmers to spend time on boring work. That just doesn't work well in open source where people only want to work on their own thing, sometimes, and in their own way.
- capableweb 5y ago
  Same could be same about good software design (as in programming), but we've found to design well written software before in a open source manner, I'm sure we could (if we focus on it) figure out something for UI/UX design as well that works in a open source context. For example, style guides written and enforced by a small team can allow open contributions for the UI design. I think it's mostly that not many have tried to figure out how to organize and actually run large-scale open source design work for UI/UX and that's why we haven't figured it out, I don't think it's "inherently" impossible.
  - lwkl 5y ago
    And look at how these projects are organized. Most of the time it's pretty much top-down with a. It's why we have the term BDFL. > good software design (as in programming) That's the second problem. Most programmers probably know about about how good software design works, but have poor taste and prefer designs that aren't suitable for software that is to be used by non-programmers that want sane defaults that work and don't overwhelm them. Just look at the theming debate. People in software developer forums are mad about it. Most users probably don't even know it exists. They just want settings and a UI that's simple enough for them to understand and allow for some basic settings. So you would have to force volunteers to implement a design that they feel is bad. And you see how a lot of people react to it in the Gnome project where people leave because of it. But at the same time Gnome is a good example of how to do UI/UX for a big open source software project (even if you don't agree with their design decisions).
    - eru 5y ago
      > And look at how these projects are organized. Most of the time it's pretty much top-down with a. It's why we have the term BDFL. To make a more general point: top down leadership is not inherently bad. But in order for this to work well, people need to have the ability to enter and exit a project or polity at will. (See eg how McDonald's doesn't let customers vote what to put on their menu, but customers are free to eat at a competitor or make their own food at home. And compare that with North Korea also not letting citizens vote on their menu. But also taking steps to keep people from switching to a competing provider of government services, like South Korea. Similar also for the Berlin Wall.)
azinman2 5y ago
As I mentioned before, Canonical and Red Hat have money and could afford proper designers. Programmers are expensive as well, and they have plenty of those on staff. Someone is putting together standard HIGs for Gnome, writing these standard themes, designing the base apps, etc. So you can't just say it's all decentralized and so there's no hope -- there's a ton of collaboration and top-down work happening with Gnome. Pulling in great UX/UI design talent should be prioritized.
- audidude 5y ago
  > As I mentioned before, Canonical and Red Hat have money and could afford proper designers. They do employ designers, including for GNOME. You might not like their designs. But to call them anything but proper is pretty mean spirited.

baybal2 5y ago

flukus 5y ago

> So basically the new GTK is iOS but without the professional designers behind it. Professional designers seem to be the ones creating these problems. Back when it was just programmers you could tell a button was a button, a tab was a tab and we didn't hide basic functionality behind a swipe gesture or long press that users were supposed to just know. Now everything is pretty but harder to use.

warning26 5y ago
> Back when it was just programmers you could tell a button was a button, a tab was a tab and we didn't hide basic functionality behind a swipe gesture or long press that users were supposed to just know. Keep in mind that programmers also gave us this: http://www.martin-achern.de/wgetgui/images/linux_wgetgui.jpg http://www.martin-achern.de/wgetgui/images/linux_wgetgui.jpg People across all disciplines are capable of making poor design choices
- userbinator 5y ago
  Keep in mind that programmers also gave us this You're basically proving the point. That is so much clearer and obvious to use than the screenshots in the original article, and it doesn't treat you like an idiot.
  - notriddle 5y ago
    Yes, I know which things are buttons, which things are text entry, and which are checkboxes. This was a strength of early 2000's UI design, and it's a shame that so many applications don't give such clear indicators any more. This application still has an absolutely crap design. * How do I specify where the downloaded data goes? Why are there onscreen options for literally everything else, but not that? * Which text entry fields are disabled, and which ones are enabled? This is something Win95 got right. * What even is "force directories"? And it looks like checkboxes are used for both it and "no directories", so what happens if I check both? * What's the difference between Spider and Recursive? Those sound like the same thing to me, and I know I'm in a pretty elite club just knowing what web spiders are at all. * Are jpeg/gif/etc only used when Reject is turned on, or are they also used when Accept is turned on? * Is the wget-list input field connected to the Input file checkbox? It's right underneath it, and presumably I have to specify the input file somewhere, but the spacing implies it's not. * What's the difference between "quiet" and "non verbose"? What happens if both are turned on? * The rest of the buttons are pretty well labeled, but what's AG? * Does it really need its own quit button? The window manager already provides one.

hiccuphippo 5y ago

I think the problem Gnome, and Microsoft, have is they keep throwing money at designers. So designers keep making designs for the sake of designing. They should stop designing, stick to the design they already have and only do incremental updates when new widgets come out.

azinman2 5y ago
It's not like everything was perfect in the past and so we're done. Far from it. Even beyond that, the world is changing. New needs, new expectations, new styles in design. Just like we wouldn't expect cars to be frozen in time in the 1950s, we shouldn't expect UI/UX to be either. Linux DE's have never had a particularly well thought out, well designed look. There's been a lot of themes that people create to mimic other commercial systems out there, but not a lot of very high quality original work going on. Yet we can see plenty of good work technologically. For a long time when it was largely grey beards most people didn't mind so much, but now people expect good design across all products. The standards have risen, and the FOSS world should meet that challenge head on.
- MichaelBurge 5y ago
  > New needs, new expectations, new styles in design. The article focus on the settings control panel. What new needs and expectations does the new settings control panel in 2022 have compared to 2010?
  - azinman2 5y ago
    The article is really about GTK3 versus GTK4, using the settings pane as an example. My comment is about the larger picture. However, take a look at what it meant to reset your default settings in 2010: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/08/restore-default-gnome-settings-in-ubuntu-quick-tip https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/08/restore-default-gnome-se... Settings panes are still largely confusing on all platforms, commercial included, as you broaden your user base. They've also grown in utility as iOS has pushed the idea of a centralized place for settings for all aspects of the system (apps included), which you're starting to see elements of on other platforms as well. There's plenty of room for improvement, including simplifying everything down so that few settings can make big differences where the heavy lifting is done for you. Linux in particular suffers from this, from a legacy of a million .conf files everywhere that many people blindly copy-pasta'd random configurations they found online (I'm looking at you XFree86).

Flankk 5y ago

Every screenshot in this blog post showcases dated design paradigms. Flat UI was popularized around the release of Windows 10 in 2015. When I go through dribbble I see a lot of mediocre and copycat design. Design is about more than copying what Apple is doing. You're not going to get style from fat guys with ponytails.

skykooler 5y ago

That's sort of what happened with ElementaryOS, isn't it?

azinman2 5y ago
Sort of. It largely was a copy of Apple, unfortunately. However I think it at least pushed the bar of what might be possible with Linux, and they're no longer around [1]. I'm hoping someone can come and give real high quality work to the FOSS community and take on a wider perspective. They had to basically do their own thing instead of pushing GNOME/KDE along, which may have to be unfortunately the case. It would be better if we could leverage the existing code bases rather than starting from scratch, but there maybe enough major things that need to change and enough resistance from the existing communities to allow for that to happen. [1] https://lunduke.substack.com/p/elementary-os-is-imploding?s=r https://lunduke.substack.com/p/elementary-os-is-imploding?s=...
- chillfox 5y ago
  Wut... what, when how??? I love ElementaryOS, it's great, everything just works, I didn't have to tweak a single thing or mess with drivers earlier this year when I installed it on a new laptop that even Mint was having issues with. Going off to read that link now.
  - azinman2 5y ago
    Funny, I tried it last year and keep getting kernel panics. That’s the thing that’s hard about Linux — a million different hardware configurations.
    - chillfox 5y ago
      yep, If you have troublesome hardware then I find the fastest solution is to just cycle through the top 10 distros to see if it works on any of them. If it does then great, you can either stop there or use it as a "guide" for how to get your favorite distro working.
- 5y ago

harry8 5y ago

If you're Apple and you make your desktop more attractive and pleasant you drive sales and market share. If you're redhat and you resource that you drive market share, to Ubuntu, who I believe still have a policy of never paying for development except for Ubuntu things, eg their failed desktop nobody else would use, Mir, bzr, etc. Is that still the case? It would be a huge disincentive for other distros to contribute to the commons when ubuntu just parasite from it to a big market share.

simion314 5y ago
>If you're redhat and you resource that you drive market share, to Ubuntu, who I believe still have a policy of never paying for development except for Ubuntu things, eg their failed desktop nobody else would use, Mir, bzr, etc. Fact check, Gnome was filled of memory leaks and performance issues until some competent Canonical developer started working back on GNOME and fixing them. So while Ubunut was not using GNOME the RH could have safely put their money into GNOME and it would not have benefited Canonical but the reality is that Canonical had to pay competent people to fix GNOME bugs, but probably Canonical can't change the desinger dictator so they usewd for a while a fixed theme and not the shity GNOME default. I disconnected myself from Linux news so I don't know what drama happened in latest 2-3 years.
- harry8 5y ago
  Who? When? What? They hired Henstridge to work on nothing to do with gnome? Redhat hired a bunch of core gnome devs to work on gnome? No? Happy to find out I'm wrong if there are facts involved...
  - simion314 5y ago
    Are you new to GNOME? this is a few years old when Canonical dropped Unity. What was happening was that each GNOME release fixed some memory leaks but create a few new ones, the lag was terrible and when Canonical moved back to GNOME a Canonical developer started fixing stuff, GNOME devs were blaming the hardware for the bugs or were busy with removing features. https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2019/10/ubuntu-improves-gnome-shell-performance https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2019/10/ubuntu-improves-gnome-sh... you can google the dev "Daniel Van Vugt" and check his work on GNOME, or you can google "GNOME shell memory leak" , as I said I stopped following Linux stuff (I am still a Linux users) and I have no idea what happened in recent years except the major things like GNOME's reset triggering a new fracture in it's community. Anway, Canonical was not using GNOME so RH did not avoided paying for better developers because Canonical would benefit. Later when Canonical decided to use GNOME they fixed the major performance issues and memory leaks and put back some of the features the users wanted but designers refused to provide.

phendrenad2 5y ago

I don't believe that Canonical or Red Hat would make any money from having a better GUI. Most of their (paying) customers are probably just running servers, or maybe running some simple dumb terminals for nontechnical employees (like a Point-of-Sale where the user may open a web browser or something).