On tech forums like r/linux or hackernews, you’ll frequently see posts by (presumably) old guys reminiscing about how great the user interface of their youth was.
“Oh how tasteful were these pixel art icons!”
“How utilitarian and consistent were the 3D effects!”
“How very intuitive are these menus!”
“It’s all gone downhill since $PRODUCT. It’s all flat and empty and useless now!”
Bollocks. These user interfaces sucked. The menus were a mess, because trying to shove 50 random items into 6 hierarchical categories, two of which are preordained to be “File” and “Edit”, cannot be done in any way that isn’t arbitrary and confusing. Thus you looked through all the little menus with your terrible mouse hoping to find something that sounded like it might be what you need, trying not to make a sudden move that made the submenu disappear.
Under the menu bar were between 30 and 200 tiny pixel art icons. They were just as incomprehensible as today’s minimalist ones, only there were more of them and most of them looked like ass.
Oh and so many popup windows. Everything you did created a popup window. Why does the settings popup only use one third of the screen while having three tabs? Why can I see my document underneath it, half-obscured, but I can’t actually click on anything there? Why do half the operations create an “OK” popup for me to click on?
Nothing about this was “functional” and yet it also looked grey and cramped and ugly. Like it was designed by C++ programmers (who by their choice of programming language have already proven that their opinion cannot be trusted, especially not in matters involving good taste), which of course it was.
Fucking brain worms, all of them.
Counterpoint: I grew up using win 95 and learned it with wet adaptable kid brain
but now they change it and brain dry and hard and can no figure out
This is basically everyone making excuses for using proprietary software instead of :programming-communism:
Nah, Windows 95 and Mac OS 8 were the pinnacle of aesthetics. I fucking hate “sleek,” I hate minimalistic. UIs just keep getting uglier and uglier. I want the nice grey boxes.
Also, I want a case and peripherals without any goddam rgb lights on them.
I have an RGB graphics card poking its lights out of the tiny vents on my lenovo desktop case from 2010 now lmao
I didn’t know it was RGB and I don’t know how to turn them off :gigachad-hd:
I just paint over every bullshit indicator LED on everything I own with black nail polish. I despise how product designers now insist on putting super bright blue LEDs on everything. I do not need the humidifier or toothbrush two rooms away to illuminate my bedroom brightly enough to read a book and blue is the worst colour for brain-fucking a sleep schedule. I used to have crippling insomnia but now that I have covered up all the unnecessary LEDs in my home, I now sleep perfectly.
I hate minimalistic
I hate the anti-user, dick-sized space between text, 200MB electron app with 1MB+ css files, anti-4k-monitor bullshit that gets passed off as “minimalist design” these days.
functional is way more minimalist than what passes for minimalist today.
Honestly the pro position is ‘Maybe all GUIs don’t work equally for everybody’. Screw this “there’s one perfect solution for all humans” mindset. Some people will do better with the old ones, some will prefer new ones, sickos will love Vista’s.
You know why I love GNOME? 'cause the mix of settings and extensions make it work perfectly for me. Maybe we should consider customisability as an essential part of a well-functioning GUI.
Power users discovered this long ago, it’s why there are ten flavours of sh shell and they all have extensive ways and usually very portable ways to customise your shell use.
Maybe all GUIs don’t work equally for everybody
Maybe we should consider customisability as an essential part of a well-functioning GUI.
100%, changing from windows to plasma radically changed the way I used my desktop and made me more productive because I could tweak every little piece to my liking.
What sucks is that the .NET ui scheme is by default very customizable. Every sub function of your program runs in it’s own “pane” that can be dragged and dropped into any other pane to create a window group.
A fantastic example of this is ArcGIS where every tool you need comes in its own window with its own settings and you can slot them into each other in whatever way you want to get a good view of your data depending on what you’re doing.
There are a few other industry programs that do this, and blender has this functionality (though not using the same UI backend). Windows could actually be good if you were able to group programs together into windows and panes, why the fuck did they build that whole ecosystem then totally abandon it for the gui?!
I just want my computer not to work or look like my phone
I also want to see EVERYTHING at once
In my experience as IT tech support, the most “user-friendly” UI is the UI you’ve been using for years and the least “user-friendly” UI is the UI you’ve never seen before. As far as I’m concerned, all UI suck equally. The grey box era sucked, the skeuomorph era sucked, and the current flat era sucks.
Nothing will ever replace CLI no matter how much semi-literate users bitch and moan about it. Actually existing illiterate computer users are equally as baffled by CLI as they are by GUI. To test this, try writing user guides using only cmd commands instead of GUI screenshots. The amount of “uh, I don’t understand what the guide is trying to say” support calls is largely the same amount when I switched from GUI screenshots to cmd commands. Given that they’re equally baffled and ignorant by both, what profit is there to teach them the more limiting option?
The major great leap forward since 2007 was having the option to search for what you want within the program itself instead of going to the help menu and searching through there. There should just be a giant search bar and when you type something like
computer <3 pls print out my document :)
The program would just do what you politely asked it to do. There would be an option for more savvy users to assign their own idiosyncratic string of characters to a command so that
:s|p-5
would mean “save the current document and print out 5 copies of it” for a particular user after they assigned that string to save the current document and print out 5 copies of it.
This is what computing should be like. No more menus and submenus and subsubmenus. No more 10 pointless windows asking whether you want to see another window asking if you want to do something. No more hamburger bullshit that shoves 50 items into a single menu. No more fugly skeuomorphic and flat garbage that’s only there so an aesthetic can pushed to consumers. No more esoteric shortcuts that you won’t remember because you don’t use the program 40 hours a week. No more magic spell commands that refuse to run because you had an extra character in a 50+ character command.
