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I've spent too much time on that website I think I've developed an appreciation of GUIs before the mid-nineties: Buttons for everything, no hidden corners and

by dimitar 13y ago

I've spent too much time on that website I think I've developed an appreciation of GUIs before the mid-nineties: Buttons for everything, no hidden corners and such, no excessive skeuomorphism, respect of preferences in colors and fonts, low feature creep, no excessive social media integration and network services 'integration' (AOL, MSN). What happened since? The open-source world hasn't offered anything of that caliber, so I guess there was a shift in thinking at some point.

GuiA 13y ago
On the open source side, feature creep and lack of design direction. On the commercial side, the internet + desire to squeeze in as much advertising/profits as possible. It is definitely still possible to have a desktop that looks and behaves like this on Linux, if you use a minimalistic window manager and apps (dwm, xmonad, open box, the suckless apps, etc). I've been doing this for a while, it makes the computing experience much nicer IMO.
weland 13y ago
The GUI I use everyday is very much like that. I have been using windowmaker as a my window manager of choice for at least six years, if not more. There is literally zero integration with any social networking stuff -- save for the occasional Facebook surfing (which I keep at a low profile), there's only the occasional IRC chat that happens in a terminal. Save for the applications (which use GTK themes, indeed -- but they also respect those -- or whatever settings I have in ~/.Xdefaults) which have their own settings, WM pretty much has the colors and fonts I tell it to. There's no skeumomorphism in it, no hidden corners and so on. To be fair, I do need to be relatively picky with the applications I use to get a reasonably clean experience. There are some tools for which I really have no working alternatives. I eventually graduated from mutt to Thunderbird, but it's fairly overloaded. The only RSS feed reader I found to be reasonably useful is newsbeuter. But in any case, I can still stay away from the flashy crap that has invaded the UI world recently. I kind of feel like a dinosaur at times, but I can do my work perfectly well, so I'm happy.
ChikkaChiChi 13y ago
The more powerful a system becomes, the less responsible the design choices seem. There has been a rush to increase functionality without taking a step back to determine if it is a good idea. The concept of modularity seems to have been forgotten.

by dimitar 13y ago

GuiA 13y ago

On the open source side, feature creep and lack of design direction. On the commercial side, the internet + desire to squeeze in as much advertising/profits as possible. It is definitely still possible to have a desktop that looks and behaves like this on Linux, if you use a minimalistic window manager and apps (dwm, xmonad, open box, the suckless apps, etc). I've been doing this for a while, it makes the computing experience much nicer IMO.

weland 13y ago

The GUI I use everyday is very much like that. I have been using windowmaker as a my window manager of choice for at least six years, if not more. There is literally zero integration with any social networking stuff -- save for the occasional Facebook surfing (which I keep at a low profile), there's only the occasional IRC chat that happens in a terminal. Save for the applications (which use GTK themes, indeed -- but they also respect those -- or whatever settings I have in ~/.Xdefaults) which have their own settings, WM pretty much has the colors and fonts I tell it to. There's no skeumomorphism in it, no hidden corners and so on. To be fair, I do need to be relatively picky with the applications I use to get a reasonably clean experience. There are some tools for which I really have no working alternatives. I eventually graduated from mutt to Thunderbird, but it's fairly overloaded. The only RSS feed reader I found to be reasonably useful is newsbeuter. But in any case, I can still stay away from the flashy crap that has invaded the UI world recently. I kind of feel like a dinosaur at times, but I can do my work perfectly well, so I'm happy.

ChikkaChiChi 13y ago

The more powerful a system becomes, the less responsible the design choices seem. There has been a rush to increase functionality without taking a step back to determine if it is a good idea. The concept of modularity seems to have been forgotten.