7 ms·

KDE is, as its name implies, a desktop environment. And it hasn't been "infected" by the "mobile" virus. I often wondered why desktop UIs became so terrible so

by GuB-42 1y ago

KDE is, as its name implies, a desktop environment. And it hasn't been "infected" by the "mobile" virus. I often wondered why desktop UIs became so terrible somewhere in the 2010s and I don't want to attribute it to laziness, greed, etc... People have been lazy and greedy since people existed, there must have been something else. And I think that mobile is the answer. UI designers are facing a really hard problem, if not impossible. Most apps nowadays have desktop and mobile variants, and you want some consistency, as you don't want users to relearn everything when switching variants. But mobile platforms, with their small touchscreens are completely different from desktop platforms with their large screens, keyboards and mice. So what do you do? In addition to mobile, you often need to target the browser too, so: native desktop, native mobile, browser desktop, browser mobile. And then you add commercial consideration like cost, brand identity, and the idea that if you didn't change the UI, you didn't change anything. Commercial considerations have always been a thing, but the multiplication of platforms made it worse, prompting for the idea of running everything in a browser, and having the desktop inferface just being the mobile interface with extra stuff.

guappa 1y ago
But… I use kde on my tablet. There's a few programs that are designed with this use in mind. For example: alligator, angelfish, kasts. Dolphin works really well too.
dismalaf 1y ago
> KDE is, as its name implies, a desktop environment. And it hasn't been "infected" by the "mobile" virus. Who do you think has been "infected" by the "mobile" virus? KDE's only real competitor is way more keyboard focused than KDE...
- marginalia_nu 1y ago
  I assume they're referring to Gnome. Despite primarily being aimed at desktop users, it's got hamburger menus everywhere[1], and a design that constantly makes trade-offs that benefit a touch-screen at the expense of keyboard-and-mouse users. [1] Hamburger menus are designed to make efficient use of a small vertical display where horizontal screen space is a limited commodity, which just is not the case at all for a large horizontal computer monitor. On a large horizontal display, they're a straight downgrade since you need to click the menu to see what's inside it, which makes action discovery harder. This click is also added to a lot of actions so they add more friction to almost all interactions.
  - everdrive 1y ago
    >and a design that constantly makes trade-offs that benefit a touch-screen at the expense of keyboard-and-mouse users. And this is true despite the fact that a vanishingly small number of users actually use a touchscreen with gnome.
  - niam 1y ago
    I must admit I don't understand this critique. I barely use a pointing device at all to navigate Gnome—mice included. Supposing I did, the only hamburger menus I can think of contain lesser-important functions of each app, like seeing the version/build number, or certain settings. I'm not sure I want something like a "See hidden files" ticker occupying screen real estate forever when I could just set it once in an accessory menu. I question whether these critiques would evaporate if, instead of the three horizontal bars, Gnome instead used a gear icon or something, and turned their contents into a pop-up window rather than a popover element.
    - marginalia_nu 1y ago
      Traditionally you'd put that in a menu still, just a horizontal one that displays the top version of the hierarchy. This allows you to skip one click, and doesn't significantly eat into the ample screen space. Perhaps the biggest problem with the hamburger menu is that there is absolutely zero convention for what you put in there, or in which order. You don't know what you'll find in the menu unless you click it. With the old top menu, there were a set of conventions for this; roughly where specific options went, and in which order, and even which hotkeys you'd press to activate the menus. This means that even in an application you were completely unfamiliar with (even hideously complex ones such as an IDE or 3d modelling software), you could fairly easily navigate the application.
      - tadfisher 1y ago
        I like the hamburger menus, because they are usually one-level deep and contain very few items. I cannot tell you how many times I want to go into an app's settings, and it takes longer than 20 seconds; some have it in File, some in Edit, others in random menus like "Tools". Further still, the damned menu item itself could be named Settings, Preferences, Options, whatever. Even further, looking at Gimp here, Preferences is one of 25 menu items that I need to scan through. This is not good UX, this is Stockholm Syndrome. Contrast with Gnome apps: Hamburger -> Preferences, invariably, never takes longer than three seconds to find it.
- j1elo 1y ago
  Google. Microsoft. Apple. In the years where "mobile is cool" became a mantra, basically everybody fell for the trend. Several examples in this random blog post that talks about the topic: https://blog.prototypr.io/mobile-first-desktop-worst-f900909ae9e2 https://blog.prototypr.io/mobile-first-desktop-worst-f900909... You asking this means (maybe?) that you're too young to have used the abhorrent default start menu of Windows 8, but yeah, forcing down users' throats the result of tucking what essentially was a mobile design into a 32" desktop monitor was the pure definition of "stupid decisions driven by marketing". And it was not only OSes, too much of the web got "infected" with these design trends that are only appropriate for small screens: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/content-dispersion/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/content-dispersion/
  - dismalaf 1y ago
    I'm old enough that the first computer I used was an IBM PC. Running PC DOS. Granted, I was very young and only remember it because of the little turtle in Logo. Then it was Apple IIs. Then Windows. I actually used Linux in the 90's. I remember Windows 8, but mainly because of the complainers. I was Linux full time by then anyway. But I do happen to enjoy having extraneous menus hidden. Why are they cluttering my screen and workspace when I'm using keyboard shortcuts anyway? I want to see my actual work, not some menu I don't need and will never click on... Using a mouse to click on a bunch of tiny menus littered all over the place is horrible for productivity and screams "boomer"...
    - j1elo 1y ago
      Oh! then you've lived well through all these design fads of the last decades. Let me assure you, a bad designer is going to do a bad job whether you give them a desktop-first framework or not, that's the kind of desktop interfaces you might be thinking of. But a mobile-first framework will always render poor results on desktop, regardless (and in spite) of the skill and knowledge of the designer. I cannot say this based on evidence, but I'll say anyways based on subjective common sense, that the Start Menu of Windows 95, 98, XP, and 7 were all immensely better than the Start ..."screen" thing of Windows 8.
  - 1y ago
- handedness 1y ago
  The GGP's comparison was KDE vs. macOS, so that's the most charitable interpretation I can think of. The comparison also holds. With every major release macOS has become more like iOS and iPadOS much more so than iOS and iPadOS have become like macOS. It's a shift I loathe, but Apple has a much harder time selling Macs to iDevice owners than the other way around. It's an understandable and maybe even unavoidable shift for Apple to make, much as it will drive a small number of die-hards elsewhere.
  - fl0ki 1y ago
    As someone who does not use Stage Manager, I don't find that the other ways macOS has become more like iOS were, to me, bad ways. The most notable changes I find were that the Settings app became far more organized and consistent, and the Control Center has tons of convenient shortcuts with a very high level of customization. In fact, Control Center is currently less customizable than iOS because you've been able to fully rearrange the controls on iOS for an entire year now. If anything, it could stand to be more like iOS in that regard, though it's not a huge deal either way. I don't particularly use widgets much either, but I never felt their inclusion was a net negative, they're just not as useful as other interfaces already available on macOS. One thing I'll definitely cede though: having some "macOS" apps actually be iOS apps, like Home, is weird not just because the UI design is unusual but also because there's been no attempt to make standard desktop hotkeys work, not even Esc.
    - chipotle_coyote 1y ago
      Good news, maybe: macOS 26's Control Center is much more like iOS in that way, and they've also added an API that will let third-party apps offer their own control center widgets.
bigstrat2003 1y ago
> But mobile platforms, with their small touchscreens are completely different from desktop platforms with their large screens, keyboards and mice. So what do you do? You keep the UIs separate. Dumbing down desktop UIs to mobile capabilities is just as bad of a design as it was when people tried to jam a desktop UI into mobile. You have to play to the strengths of the platform you are on, not limit each one based on the other. Yes, it's more work, but it's well worth it to have a product which is actually good.
- amatecha 1y ago
  Right? It's blatantly obvious, but apparently a 3.5 trillion-dollar-market-cap corporation has apparently forgotten this simple concept. It's so disappointing how far Apple has fallen, in terms of usability of their software.
  - xgkickt 1y ago
    At least Apple still allows the user to reposition the dock/taskbar.
    - bee_rider 1y ago
      That seems like a pretty low bar, is there any window manager that doesn’t have that sort of basic configurability? Linux window managers are mostly made by volunteers, so I’m not picky at all. But, locking the dock and taskbar in place, if anything, seems like extra work. Why would anybody do extra work to make their window manager worse?
      - blooalien 1y ago
        > That seems like a pretty low bar, is there any window manager that doesn’t have that sort of basic configurability? I heard rumours that Win 11 was makin' folks jump through hoops to move the taskbar anywhere other than left or right along the bottom. Personally, I ain't used Windows since Win 7; (The last really decent / tolerable Windows), and even back then I was already dual-booting with Linux.
fluidcruft 1y ago
You probably mean tablets/touch input, not mobile. There was a time when things like iPad and Surface were going to dominate. iOS won that space with Android still limping along. Windows devices haven't managed to survive really and Surface seems to be retreating to laptop form. Frankly the SOC hardware universe seems to be a real technical challenge. Frankly, even Microsoft gave up trying to improve the phone hardware situation.
- freeopinion 1y ago
  I think the small form factor of mobile is more relevant than touch, although touch is also a significant factor. App design is forced to change radically to be usable at all on tiny screens. Indeed, touch is a result of the tiny aspect of mobile.
  - pixelready 1y ago
    Mobile form factor and touch inputs are pretty inseparable, and are so different from desktop + pointer. A lot of subtle pain points get missed because people tend to focus on one over the other. So many desktop patterns rely on hover interactions. Touch targets need to be big enough for beefy fingers (which will then cover the thing being touched). Gesture is considered normal on touch devices but not pointer ones. Reading distance differences between mobile devices and desktop ones impacts typography. And that’s just a few basic UX concerns all before you get into the weeds of WCAG and other accessibility standards. TL;DR - your designer needs a hug
noisem4ker 1y ago
KDE does have a convergent UI framework, though. It's called Kirigami, and I think several KDE apps use it to also get a mobile version. Perhaps it's more about doing things well and compatibly with the mobile presentation, just not "mobile first" (which often factually implies "and desktop never").
- dotancohen 1y ago
  I develop a Qt app that needs a mobile version, though I've never done mobile development before. I use Qt for the desktop app specifically because a I'm a long time KDE user. What does convergent mean in this context? What would Kirigami bring to a potential Android application? Thanks
  - heavyset_go 1y ago
    He's talking about MauiKit, which is a superset of Kirigami. https://mauikit.org/ https://mauikit.org/ You get some nice predefined widgets to use with QML, but you also potentially have to build Maui/Kirigami against the platforms you deploy to, and it's a C++ & QML project with its own build platform.
    - dotancohen 1y ago
      Thank you
    - Citizen_Lame 1y ago
      Is MauiKit still maintained, seeing even the main links on website don't work. Like MauiKit Documentation?
      - heavyset_go 1y ago
        No idea, but I think the maintainers are available on IRC or whatever KDE is using for chat these days if you want to ask them.
- account42 1y ago
fsflover 1y ago
> But mobile platforms, with their small touchscreens are completely different from desktop platforms with their large screens, keyboards and mice. So what do you do? This is not an example from KDE, but you do convergence: https://videos.puri.sm/pureos/l5-convergence-purism.mp4 https://videos.puri.sm/pureos/l5-convergence-purism.mp4
- account42 1y ago
  No, that's an example of the problem being discussed: mobile UI on a desktop.
  - fsflover 1y ago
    Which problem exactly? It works just fine. Just like there is no problem with well-designed websites that can work both on mobile and on desktop (like HN).
aucisson_masque 1y ago
Ever heard of plasma mobile ? That’s your KDE on mobile. And windows which is horrendous doesn’t have a mobile version, at least not something people know about. You have an interesting theory but I think it doesn’t hold when you take these 2 facts into consideration.
bitwize 1y ago
Yes, companies were lazy and greedy even way back when. But there are a number of facts that come into play when it comes to UI being much shittier today: 1. Personal computers before the 21st century were really kind of shit. Let alone mobile devices. 2. Software was largely a product that people paid for. It even came in boxes. 3. Software vendors were usually in a highly competitive environment. They had to deliver value for money if they didn't want to get eaten alive. This meant that the software had to both work on the limited resources of 1990s shitty computers—limited storage, limited speed, limited display colors and resolution, etc.—and be useful to the end user. So companies were kept a lot more honest in terms of UI design. Circumstances forced them to deliver functional, efficient UIs. These days, our computers are fairly powerful and companies are in the business of selling services (or eyeballs to advertisers) rather than software. The user-facing software itself is a loss leader, and if making it a shitty Electron app, or desktop-mobile "convergence", helps save development costs, companies will do it.
account42 1y ago
> Most apps nowadays have desktop and mobile variants, and you want some consistency, as you don't want users to relearn everything when switching variants. I don't think anyone actually asks for this. The driving factor seems to be saving cost/effort by making only one design with extremely minor adjustments at best. It used to be that desktop was the main target now its mobile. The consistency I want is between different applications on the same system but barely anyone cares about that - and many developers actively want their programs to stand out.

by GuB-42 1y ago

guappa 1y ago

But… I use kde on my tablet. There's a few programs that are designed with this use in mind. For example: alligator, angelfish, kasts. Dolphin works really well too.

dismalaf 1y ago

> KDE is, as its name implies, a desktop environment. And it hasn't been "infected" by the "mobile" virus. Who do you think has been "infected" by the "mobile" virus? KDE's only real competitor is way more keyboard focused than KDE...

marginalia_nu 1y ago
I assume they're referring to Gnome. Despite primarily being aimed at desktop users, it's got hamburger menus everywhere[1], and a design that constantly makes trade-offs that benefit a touch-screen at the expense of keyboard-and-mouse users. [1] Hamburger menus are designed to make efficient use of a small vertical display where horizontal screen space is a limited commodity, which just is not the case at all for a large horizontal computer monitor. On a large horizontal display, they're a straight downgrade since you need to click the menu to see what's inside it, which makes action discovery harder. This click is also added to a lot of actions so they add more friction to almost all interactions.
- everdrive 1y ago
  >and a design that constantly makes trade-offs that benefit a touch-screen at the expense of keyboard-and-mouse users. And this is true despite the fact that a vanishingly small number of users actually use a touchscreen with gnome.
- niam 1y ago
  I must admit I don't understand this critique. I barely use a pointing device at all to navigate Gnome—mice included. Supposing I did, the only hamburger menus I can think of contain lesser-important functions of each app, like seeing the version/build number, or certain settings. I'm not sure I want something like a "See hidden files" ticker occupying screen real estate forever when I could just set it once in an accessory menu. I question whether these critiques would evaporate if, instead of the three horizontal bars, Gnome instead used a gear icon or something, and turned their contents into a pop-up window rather than a popover element.
  - marginalia_nu 1y ago
    Traditionally you'd put that in a menu still, just a horizontal one that displays the top version of the hierarchy. This allows you to skip one click, and doesn't significantly eat into the ample screen space. Perhaps the biggest problem with the hamburger menu is that there is absolutely zero convention for what you put in there, or in which order. You don't know what you'll find in the menu unless you click it. With the old top menu, there were a set of conventions for this; roughly where specific options went, and in which order, and even which hotkeys you'd press to activate the menus. This means that even in an application you were completely unfamiliar with (even hideously complex ones such as an IDE or 3d modelling software), you could fairly easily navigate the application.
    - tadfisher 1y ago
      I like the hamburger menus, because they are usually one-level deep and contain very few items. I cannot tell you how many times I want to go into an app's settings, and it takes longer than 20 seconds; some have it in File, some in Edit, others in random menus like "Tools". Further still, the damned menu item itself could be named Settings, Preferences, Options, whatever. Even further, looking at Gimp here, Preferences is one of 25 menu items that I need to scan through. This is not good UX, this is Stockholm Syndrome. Contrast with Gnome apps: Hamburger -> Preferences, invariably, never takes longer than three seconds to find it.
j1elo 1y ago
Google. Microsoft. Apple. In the years where "mobile is cool" became a mantra, basically everybody fell for the trend. Several examples in this random blog post that talks about the topic: https://blog.prototypr.io/mobile-first-desktop-worst-f900909ae9e2 https://blog.prototypr.io/mobile-first-desktop-worst-f900909... You asking this means (maybe?) that you're too young to have used the abhorrent default start menu of Windows 8, but yeah, forcing down users' throats the result of tucking what essentially was a mobile design into a 32" desktop monitor was the pure definition of "stupid decisions driven by marketing". And it was not only OSes, too much of the web got "infected" with these design trends that are only appropriate for small screens: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/content-dispersion/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/content-dispersion/
- dismalaf 1y ago
  I'm old enough that the first computer I used was an IBM PC. Running PC DOS. Granted, I was very young and only remember it because of the little turtle in Logo. Then it was Apple IIs. Then Windows. I actually used Linux in the 90's. I remember Windows 8, but mainly because of the complainers. I was Linux full time by then anyway. But I do happen to enjoy having extraneous menus hidden. Why are they cluttering my screen and workspace when I'm using keyboard shortcuts anyway? I want to see my actual work, not some menu I don't need and will never click on... Using a mouse to click on a bunch of tiny menus littered all over the place is horrible for productivity and screams "boomer"...
  - j1elo 1y ago
    Oh! then you've lived well through all these design fads of the last decades. Let me assure you, a bad designer is going to do a bad job whether you give them a desktop-first framework or not, that's the kind of desktop interfaces you might be thinking of. But a mobile-first framework will always render poor results on desktop, regardless (and in spite) of the skill and knowledge of the designer. I cannot say this based on evidence, but I'll say anyways based on subjective common sense, that the Start Menu of Windows 95, 98, XP, and 7 were all immensely better than the Start ..."screen" thing of Windows 8.
- 1y ago
handedness 1y ago
The GGP's comparison was KDE vs. macOS, so that's the most charitable interpretation I can think of. The comparison also holds. With every major release macOS has become more like iOS and iPadOS much more so than iOS and iPadOS have become like macOS. It's a shift I loathe, but Apple has a much harder time selling Macs to iDevice owners than the other way around. It's an understandable and maybe even unavoidable shift for Apple to make, much as it will drive a small number of die-hards elsewhere.
- fl0ki 1y ago
  As someone who does not use Stage Manager, I don't find that the other ways macOS has become more like iOS were, to me, bad ways. The most notable changes I find were that the Settings app became far more organized and consistent, and the Control Center has tons of convenient shortcuts with a very high level of customization. In fact, Control Center is currently less customizable than iOS because you've been able to fully rearrange the controls on iOS for an entire year now. If anything, it could stand to be more like iOS in that regard, though it's not a huge deal either way. I don't particularly use widgets much either, but I never felt their inclusion was a net negative, they're just not as useful as other interfaces already available on macOS. One thing I'll definitely cede though: having some "macOS" apps actually be iOS apps, like Home, is weird not just because the UI design is unusual but also because there's been no attempt to make standard desktop hotkeys work, not even Esc.
  - chipotle_coyote 1y ago
    Good news, maybe: macOS 26's Control Center is much more like iOS in that way, and they've also added an API that will let third-party apps offer their own control center widgets.

bigstrat2003 1y ago

> But mobile platforms, with their small touchscreens are completely different from desktop platforms with their large screens, keyboards and mice. So what do you do? You keep the UIs separate. Dumbing down desktop UIs to mobile capabilities is just as bad of a design as it was when people tried to jam a desktop UI into mobile. You have to play to the strengths of the platform you are on, not limit each one based on the other. Yes, it's more work, but it's well worth it to have a product which is actually good.

amatecha 1y ago
Right? It's blatantly obvious, but apparently a 3.5 trillion-dollar-market-cap corporation has apparently forgotten this simple concept. It's so disappointing how far Apple has fallen, in terms of usability of their software.
- xgkickt 1y ago
  At least Apple still allows the user to reposition the dock/taskbar.
  - bee_rider 1y ago
    That seems like a pretty low bar, is there any window manager that doesn’t have that sort of basic configurability? Linux window managers are mostly made by volunteers, so I’m not picky at all. But, locking the dock and taskbar in place, if anything, seems like extra work. Why would anybody do extra work to make their window manager worse?
    - blooalien 1y ago
      > That seems like a pretty low bar, is there any window manager that doesn’t have that sort of basic configurability? I heard rumours that Win 11 was makin' folks jump through hoops to move the taskbar anywhere other than left or right along the bottom. Personally, I ain't used Windows since Win 7; (The last really decent / tolerable Windows), and even back then I was already dual-booting with Linux.

fluidcruft 1y ago

You probably mean tablets/touch input, not mobile. There was a time when things like iPad and Surface were going to dominate. iOS won that space with Android still limping along. Windows devices haven't managed to survive really and Surface seems to be retreating to laptop form. Frankly the SOC hardware universe seems to be a real technical challenge. Frankly, even Microsoft gave up trying to improve the phone hardware situation.

freeopinion 1y ago
I think the small form factor of mobile is more relevant than touch, although touch is also a significant factor. App design is forced to change radically to be usable at all on tiny screens. Indeed, touch is a result of the tiny aspect of mobile.
- pixelready 1y ago
  Mobile form factor and touch inputs are pretty inseparable, and are so different from desktop + pointer. A lot of subtle pain points get missed because people tend to focus on one over the other. So many desktop patterns rely on hover interactions. Touch targets need to be big enough for beefy fingers (which will then cover the thing being touched). Gesture is considered normal on touch devices but not pointer ones. Reading distance differences between mobile devices and desktop ones impacts typography. And that’s just a few basic UX concerns all before you get into the weeds of WCAG and other accessibility standards. TL;DR - your designer needs a hug

noisem4ker 1y ago

KDE does have a convergent UI framework, though. It's called Kirigami, and I think several KDE apps use it to also get a mobile version. Perhaps it's more about doing things well and compatibly with the mobile presentation, just not "mobile first" (which often factually implies "and desktop never").

dotancohen 1y ago
I develop a Qt app that needs a mobile version, though I've never done mobile development before. I use Qt for the desktop app specifically because a I'm a long time KDE user. What does convergent mean in this context? What would Kirigami bring to a potential Android application? Thanks
- heavyset_go 1y ago
  He's talking about MauiKit, which is a superset of Kirigami. https://mauikit.org/ https://mauikit.org/ You get some nice predefined widgets to use with QML, but you also potentially have to build Maui/Kirigami against the platforms you deploy to, and it's a C++ & QML project with its own build platform.
  - dotancohen 1y ago
    Thank you
  - Citizen_Lame 1y ago
    Is MauiKit still maintained, seeing even the main links on website don't work. Like MauiKit Documentation?
    - heavyset_go 1y ago
      No idea, but I think the maintainers are available on IRC or whatever KDE is using for chat these days if you want to ask them.
account42 1y ago

fsflover 1y ago

> But mobile platforms, with their small touchscreens are completely different from desktop platforms with their large screens, keyboards and mice. So what do you do? This is not an example from KDE, but you do convergence: https://videos.puri.sm/pureos/l5-convergence-purism.mp4 https://videos.puri.sm/pureos/l5-convergence-purism.mp4

account42 1y ago
No, that's an example of the problem being discussed: mobile UI on a desktop.
- fsflover 1y ago
  Which problem exactly? It works just fine. Just like there is no problem with well-designed websites that can work both on mobile and on desktop (like HN).

aucisson_masque 1y ago

Ever heard of plasma mobile ? That’s your KDE on mobile. And windows which is horrendous doesn’t have a mobile version, at least not something people know about. You have an interesting theory but I think it doesn’t hold when you take these 2 facts into consideration.

bitwize 1y ago

Yes, companies were lazy and greedy even way back when. But there are a number of facts that come into play when it comes to UI being much shittier today: 1. Personal computers before the 21st century were really kind of shit. Let alone mobile devices. 2. Software was largely a product that people paid for. It even came in boxes. 3. Software vendors were usually in a highly competitive environment. They had to deliver value for money if they didn't want to get eaten alive. This meant that the software had to both work on the limited resources of 1990s shitty computers—limited storage, limited speed, limited display colors and resolution, etc.—and be useful to the end user. So companies were kept a lot more honest in terms of UI design. Circumstances forced them to deliver functional, efficient UIs. These days, our computers are fairly powerful and companies are in the business of selling services (or eyeballs to advertisers) rather than software. The user-facing software itself is a loss leader, and if making it a shitty Electron app, or desktop-mobile "convergence", helps save development costs, companies will do it.

account42 1y ago

> Most apps nowadays have desktop and mobile variants, and you want some consistency, as you don't want users to relearn everything when switching variants. I don't think anyone actually asks for this. The driving factor seems to be saving cost/effort by making only one design with extremely minor adjustments at best. It used to be that desktop was the main target now its mobile. The consistency I want is between different applications on the same system but barely anyone cares about that - and many developers actively want their programs to stand out.