It gets even worse, when doing projects where you are basically glueing SaaS products together, the common trend in enterprise consulting.

https://xkcd.com/1988/

> but I feel like software engineering has lost much of its craftsmanship

It's not just software. I'm very pro-business / pro-capitalism but I will happily agree that an omnipresent business pressure is to reduce costs and get products and services to market rapidly.

My wife and I bought an antique store this year, and we're converting it into a small live theatre with a magic (stage magic) retail store up front. We are pouring our hearts and soul into this and are trying to bring a high degree of craftsmanship into the venture. We're taking queues from Walt Disney World and want you to feel like you've stepped into a completely different world when you step inside our doors.

Yet now that we're running out of money and things have taken way longer than we had estimated, we have to cut scope. We have to start thinking "What needs to be done today in order for us to open" vs "What can we defer and iterate on and do later?" What are the "nice to haves" and what are the "must haves."

That's business and you see enshitification in all industries. We can see this in everything from clothing to furniture to product packaging. The incentive is always to try and deliver things to market faster and cheaper and this necessitates making cuts. Craftsmanship is a luxury that we all pine for. And there are small mom & pop shops (us included) that try to deliver craftsmanship. But the market for high-cost products with high-craftsmanship is niche.

Software is largely targeting the mass market just like clothing and furniture - other examples where you've seen "high craftsmanship" in the past but these days we get mass produced disposable garbage. It's tempting to say "the good old days" but people had a lot less and that high-craftsmanship furniture was often passed down from one generation to another because it's not like people could typically afford that stuff. It was that people had to save, DIY more, own less and count on hand-me-downs.

Image and projection of that image is very important for most humans. You just need to look at how some people dress in order to "look good" even though it often requires them to make some ridiculous compromises on confort.

> It's not so much double the design work, it's double the code maintenance.

Well, of course it is: Different UI, different UI code. If that's problem, the developers should not have both a mobile and a desktop app in the first place.

> has tended to reduce the pleasantness of the Desktop

understatement of the year :-) ... it often hampers functionality, significantly, and makes the experience rather painful.

Everyone will have different opinions on the matter. My Lenovo has a touch screen, but I hardly ever use it because I forget that it is there. Likewise, it is Wacom compatible and I was as far as picking up the stylus for it. Hardly ever use it. For the most part, I prefer to interact with computers via keyboard.

Different people like interacting with computers in different ways, unfortunately, this one size fits all philosophy that permeates the tech sector creates a lot of tension because those ways of interacting are not necessarily compatible with each other.

Are you the type to be bothered by fingerprints on screens? I am that type, I have great reservations about a touchscreen laptop. Though, I cannot deny how awesome it would be, conceptually.

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?

What's mad is how few people do it. You'd think on a 16:10 people would want to make the most of the 10.

Is MauiKit still maintained, seeing even the main links on website don't work. Like MauiKit Documentation?

Thank you

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/Fi... -- building designs around what looks aesthetically uniform and cool rather than what is easy to parse and use.

Just noticed Reddit uses an oddly placed hamburger menu icon to signify the action of clossing the navigation sidebar.

https://imgur.com/ZjBZhE1

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.

> Supposing I did, the only hamburger menus I can think of contain lesser-important functions of each app

gEdit places almost everything in the hamburger menu; opening and saving files have dedicated buttons but for example find/replace is behind the burger, as is "save as". It may not matter much if you use keyboard shortcuts (ctrl+f is pretty common for find and I never try to look for it in the menu) but one might still expect a GUI to allow its features to be easily accessed without the use of a keyboard. I don't think the mix of a few dedicated buttons and a single hamburger menu is necessarily good for discoverability either.

The Image Viewer puts file management and image rotating in the hamburger menu. Oddly enough, other image editing options are available in a separate editing mode that's accessed via its own dedicated button. Also, although file management features are behind the hamburger menu, for some reason image properties are behind a dedicated button.

In both cases the only reason the hamburger menus aren't more populated is because there just isn't that much functionality in either app to begin with.

Evince (the document viewer) also puts almost everything in the hamburger menu -- although in that case, if a traditional menu bar were used instead of the hamburger, most of its functions would probably only be split between "file" and "view" menus or something along those lines.

I'm not sure if those apps are still Gnome defaults but they're some of the examples of what I'd consider somewhat poorly considered use of the hamburger menu.

Outside of Gnome, the new UI in JetBrains IDEs has switched to hiding typical menu bar menus behind a hamburger menu button. I honestly don't understand that decision at all: the menus are still the same, they just require an additional click to access, and since the selection of available menus is only revealed after clicking the button, you can only start scanning for the menu you're looking for after the reveal. While separate from free software desktop design, the new UI in those IDEs is another example of what I would also consider mobile-influenced degradation of desktop UIs -- and a particularly weird one at that.

That's rarely how they are used though, much more often they're used to replace the horizontal top menu bar.

Touch and hold is fine as a right click.

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.

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.