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> 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"

> 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.
      - pndy 1y ago
        Hamburger menu is a good solution for simple and small desktop apps but it's not a good choice to use it for anything complex. There's this Pinta image editor that since its initial release offered standard menus - for years it looked nearly identical to Paint.NET on which is partially based. In January devs switched to GTK4/libadwaita; new 3.0 release replaced menus with combined hamburger menu which of course cannot be decoupled in any way and which make advanced editing annoying. There's more clicking to do anything unless you decide to learn all shortcuts. And this "learn shortcuts" is quite common answer to hamburger menu complains.
- fluidcruft 1y ago
  Hamburger menus are also useful for things that otherwise would be behind a right-click. I personally have not encountered a good replacement for right-click in touch UIs.
  - marginalia_nu 1y ago
    That's rarely how they are used though, much more often they're used to replace the horizontal top menu bar.
    - fluidcruft 1y ago
      I don't disagree, but I think that's another reason they exist beyond screen real estate on mobile. Context menus take no screen space, but they don't play nice with touch.
      - marginalia_nu 1y ago
        There are plenty of alternative paradigms on touch interfaces, both two finger tap (on capable devices) as well as side-swipe are used to bring up menus that are as contextful (or more) than the burger menu.
        blooalien 1y ago
        "Long-tap" (tap and hold for a second) is another right-click alternative I've seen used to great effect on touch interfaces.
        fluidcruft 1y ago
        It works sometimes but it seems like drag me and it's really awkward when something can/should be both dragged or right clicked.
    - tadfisher 1y ago
      They are for rarely-used actions. The corollary is that frequently-used actions are surfaced directly in the header bar instead of buried in menus. This is almost universally good. I say "almost" because content creation applications have so many actions that a menu bar sometimes makes sense; I'm thinking in particular of Inkscape with three sides of the window occupied by icons and a bizarre hamburger icon in the bottom of the right panel for some reason.
- foresto 1y ago
  They also look like a gripper widget: a small square that can be dragged around in order to move the item on which it appears, commonly used for for positioning toolbars or re-ordering list items. Because of this, they have added a bit of confusion to user interface conventions.
  - marginalia_nu 1y ago
    Modern monochrome line-art icons are an entirely separate trainwreck to be honest. They're incredibly difficult to parse and distinguish. It very much feels like we've fallen into the same trap medieval handwriting did https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minim_(palaeography)#/media/File:Minims_(palaeography).jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minim_(palaeography)#/media/Fi... -- building designs around what looks aesthetically uniform and cool rather than what is easy to parse and use.
    - hulitu 1y ago
      > They're incredibly difficult to parse and distinguish And the fact that they are changed every couple of years, doesn't help either.
    - seec 1y ago
      Indeed. It's all fashion nowadays. It's a form of aestheticism which I believe is closely linked to religiousness. There is a lot to develop but you can already observe than a lot of people have an approach to technology that isn't too far from the approach to "god" related things.
  - marginalia_nu 1y ago
    Just noticed Reddit uses an oddly placed hamburger menu icon to signify the action of clossing the navigation sidebar. https://imgur.com/ZjBZhE1 https://imgur.com/ZjBZhE1
- vitorgrs 1y ago
  KDE changed their design to include hamburger menu. Even KDE's Terminal have a "hamburger" menu.
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.

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.
    - pndy 1y ago
      Hamburger menu is a good solution for simple and small desktop apps but it's not a good choice to use it for anything complex. There's this Pinta image editor that since its initial release offered standard menus - for years it looked nearly identical to Paint.NET on which is partially based. In January devs switched to GTK4/libadwaita; new 3.0 release replaced menus with combined hamburger menu which of course cannot be decoupled in any way and which make advanced editing annoying. There's more clicking to do anything unless you decide to learn all shortcuts. And this "learn shortcuts" is quite common answer to hamburger menu complains.
fluidcruft 1y ago
Hamburger menus are also useful for things that otherwise would be behind a right-click. I personally have not encountered a good replacement for right-click in touch UIs.
- marginalia_nu 1y ago
  That's rarely how they are used though, much more often they're used to replace the horizontal top menu bar.
  - fluidcruft 1y ago
    I don't disagree, but I think that's another reason they exist beyond screen real estate on mobile. Context menus take no screen space, but they don't play nice with touch.
    - marginalia_nu 1y ago
      There are plenty of alternative paradigms on touch interfaces, both two finger tap (on capable devices) as well as side-swipe are used to bring up menus that are as contextful (or more) than the burger menu.
      - blooalien 1y ago
        "Long-tap" (tap and hold for a second) is another right-click alternative I've seen used to great effect on touch interfaces.
        fluidcruft 1y ago
        It works sometimes but it seems like drag me and it's really awkward when something can/should be both dragged or right clicked.
  - tadfisher 1y ago
    They are for rarely-used actions. The corollary is that frequently-used actions are surfaced directly in the header bar instead of buried in menus. This is almost universally good. I say "almost" because content creation applications have so many actions that a menu bar sometimes makes sense; I'm thinking in particular of Inkscape with three sides of the window occupied by icons and a bizarre hamburger icon in the bottom of the right panel for some reason.
foresto 1y ago
They also look like a gripper widget: a small square that can be dragged around in order to move the item on which it appears, commonly used for for positioning toolbars or re-ordering list items. Because of this, they have added a bit of confusion to user interface conventions.
- marginalia_nu 1y ago
  Modern monochrome line-art icons are an entirely separate trainwreck to be honest. They're incredibly difficult to parse and distinguish. It very much feels like we've fallen into the same trap medieval handwriting did https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minim_(palaeography)#/media/File:Minims_(palaeography).jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minim_(palaeography)#/media/Fi... -- building designs around what looks aesthetically uniform and cool rather than what is easy to parse and use.
  - hulitu 1y ago
    > They're incredibly difficult to parse and distinguish And the fact that they are changed every couple of years, doesn't help either.
  - seec 1y ago
    Indeed. It's all fashion nowadays. It's a form of aestheticism which I believe is closely linked to religiousness. There is a lot to develop but you can already observe than a lot of people have an approach to technology that isn't too far from the approach to "god" related things.
- marginalia_nu 1y ago
  Just noticed Reddit uses an oddly placed hamburger menu icon to signify the action of clossing the navigation sidebar. https://imgur.com/ZjBZhE1 https://imgur.com/ZjBZhE1
vitorgrs 1y ago
KDE changed their design to include hamburger menu. Even KDE's Terminal have a "hamburger" menu.

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.