Looks really nice, I like the idea.

But can they please empower a user interface designer to simply improve the margins and paddings of their interface? With a bunch of small improvements it would look significantly better. Just fix the spacing between buttons and borders and other UI elements.

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wild_egg 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Modern UX trends are a scourge of excessive whitespace and low information density that get in the way of actually accomplishing tasks.

Any project that rejects those trends gets bonus points in my book.

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linguae 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I sympathize, but I feel compelled to point out that the parent didn’t say that the interface had to look like a contemporary desktop.

In my opinion, I believe the Tiny Core Linux GUI could use some more refinement. It seems inspired by 90s interfaces, but when compared to the interfaces of the classic Mac OS, Windows 95, OS/2 Warp, and BeOS, there’s more work to be done regarding the fit-and-finish of the UI, judging by the screenshots.

To be fair, I assume this is a hobbyist open source project where the contributors spend time as they see fit. I don’t want to be too harsh. Fit-and-finish is challenging; not even Steve Jobs-era Apple with all of its resources got Aqua right the first time when it unveiled the Mac OS X Public Beta in 2000. Massive changes were made between the beta and Mac OS X 10.0, and Aqua kept getting refined with each successive version, with the most refined version, in my opinion, being Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, nearly five years after the public beta.

	▲	oso2k 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		With CorePlus, you have the the choice of some 10 GUI environments. I prefer openbox or jwm.

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

If you look at the screenshots it immediately jumps out that it is unpolished: the spacings are all over the place, the window maximize/minimize/close buttons have different widths and weird margins.

I thought that would be immediately clear to the HN crowd but I might have overestimated your aesthetic senses.

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Perz1val 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Look at screenshots -> wallpaper window. The spacing between elements is all over the place and it simply looks like shit. Seeing this I'm having doubts if the team who did this is competent at all

	▲	bflesch 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Exactly. I know that not everybody spent 10 years fiddling with CSS so I can understand why a project might have a skill gap with regards to aesthetics. I'm not trying to judge their overall competence, just wanted to say that there are so many quick wins in the design it hurts me a bit to see it. And due to nature of open source projects I was talking about "empowering" a designer to improve it because oftentimes you submit a PR for aesthetic improvements and then notice that the project leaders don't care about these things, which is sad.

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delfinom 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There is a balance.

Too much information density is also disorienting, if not stressing. The biggest problem is finding that balance between multiple kinds of users and even individuals.

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ohhellnawman 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]

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pbhjpbhj 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This just looks like a standard _old_ *nix project. I've used Tiny, a couple of decades ago IIRC, from a magazine cover CD.

I imagine the sign-off date of 2008, the lack of very simple to apply mobile css, and no https to secure the downloads (if it had it then it would probably be SSL).

This speaks to me of a project that's 'good enough', or abandoned, for/by those who made it. Left out to pasture as 'community dev submissions accepted'.

I've not bothered to look, but wouldn't surprise me if the UI is hardcoded in assembly and a complete ballache to try and change.

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

One could argue that visible borders are a feature, not a bug.

If you are trying to maximize for accessibility, that is.

	▲	bflesch 6 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It's not about the damn borders it is about the spacing between the buttons and other UI elements as you can see in the screenshot. I don't want them to introduce some shitty modern design, just fix the spacing so it doesn't immediately jump out as odd and unpolished.
	▲	egormakarov 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Pretty sure it was not about presence of visible borders, but about missing spacing between borders and buttons. That on some screenshots, but not others. It's not like this ui has some high-density philosophy, it's just very inconsistent

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throwaway984393 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]