As a KDE Plasma dev, I always counted on us getting better, but I didn't expect the competition to get so much worse. We'd be flamed to high and heaven for shipping broken notification popups and rendering glitches like that in a prod release.

What happened internally to cause this, I wonder?

pndy 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

After years with Xfce and GNOME, I recently switched to distro that by default prefers KDE, and I'm overall satisfied - Qogir theme, little customization and I'm as good as I was with Win7. Plasma 6.4.5 feels way more stable than line 5 that would crash during stupidest things.

As for what happen at Cupertino: it seems that they replaced people who knew theory and practice, principles of interface design with designers who were told to make a product that looks "fresh" and will diverge attention from Apple's AI failure.

Because why this Liquid Glass now if not as "rattling keys" effect? It's not a technological breakthrough - we've seen translucent plastic/glass/acrylic elements and fancy animations in operating systems before. Hell, even Plasma had that glass stuff in initial line 4 of release. And OSX had Aqua interface, window animations long before Microsoft wasted years for Longhorn finally releasing it as Vista with Aero. Not mention Compiz on Linux around same time.

My partner is already baffled with lack of polish and consistency across the system in this release. In some places it's just a transitional animation added on top of flat style for "wow" effect because hardware nowadays doesn't tax much for that. Tahoe feels like it tries to follow GNOME/Adwaita big interface elements that should stay exclusively on mobile devices, and it does this quite late and also really bad.

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shantara 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The rumor mill speculates that Apple needed to ship something big and flashy to distract people from calling them out on their failure to deliver on the AI features promised (and previewed!) more than a year ago.

	▲	touristtam 6 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I've heard another take that is interesting and a clear departure from that never ending moaning: Like the ultra slim new iPhone that could be a step to validate the technical challenges to a foldable device, this change in UI is to prepare the user base for a complete change in the form factor, be it a glass slab or a greater focus on wearable (ala glasses).
	▲	anakaine 8 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		They probably should have just eaten the AI non delivery instead of now having two major failures.

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itopaloglu83 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There’s no way this was developed by Apple. I keep thinking that they outsourced the macOS development to some amateurs online and took a year off traveling the world.

Looking at the screenshots and review videos, I cannot believe how ugly and out of proportion it is. Normally, there would be a consistent design and some people like it while others don’t. But this is simply ugly.

	▲	travisgriggs 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		My guess is that it’s all product managers and “designers” now, a whole religion of procedures and terminology, and unfortunately very little engineering of the kinds that some of the early Ux pioneers applied.

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deprave 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That’s the important question. Someone else on the thread suggested it was to divert attention from one failure (AI) and now they have two. I wonder how Steve Jobs would react to this mess. Maybe he’d say he would not have been in such a mess in the first place. :)

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sbuk an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

People in glass houses...

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heavyset_go 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

At this point, I have Plasma configured as a better macOS shell. Not a clone, those always look bad, but layouts close enough that my macOS muscle memory can't tell the difference.

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vachina 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Wow those looks broken. I switched to Mac precisely thinking Apple knew best. Whatever happened to don’t change it if it ain’t broken?

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justahuman74 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

My guess is organizational inertia around dependency chains