Games are entertainment products, not tools. It's acceptable for a game UI to draw attention to itself for artistic effect, but I don't want to have to put up with this when I'm trying to get work done. Instant state transitions become imperceptible as you learn how they work. An instant UI effectively functions as part of your body, just like hand tools do. Animations make this impossible.

Compare an ordinary pencil (no animations, movement is directly tied to your hand) to a pencil with a pompom on a spring attached to the end. Which is most fun for brief use? Which would you rather write a whole page of text with?

Maybe you dislike them, but that does not make for a fact.

Instant transitions are something I strongly prefer and use in practice. There's no question, I don't want my operating system slowing itself down to a factor (literally) of 1000x, pointlessly fading and jiggling and sliding and bouncing and wiggling. And, as this article points out, animations in operating systems often make a visually illegible mess in the meanwhile.

Animations might be a good idea in theory, but it doesn't seem like anyone has figured out how to do them right.

No they are not used everywhere. Some games with good UI use animations everywhere that an animation is appropriate. But plenty of good UI exist without animations. The point above is that no animation is better than an inappropriate animation.

Games are for fun. Wasting time in a game is fine, that's what it is for. (edit: not saying that pejoratively)

Other applications are to do things. They should do the thing and get out of the way as fast as possible. Animation-induced delays are fundamentally contradictory with that; they waste the user's time instead of doing the thing.

You will also see plenty of cases where a screenshot captures incoherent frames.

Squash and stretch is a whole art style that relies on unrealistic frames.

I stopped playing quite a few games because of gratuitous animations.

Games are games, work is work. I disabled every animated transitions in my desktop UI. Elements appear instantly at full size in the place they rest and disappear instantly.

Reasons:

1) I'm doing that thousands of times per week, I know what's going to happen

2) It's my desktop, there is no one else who might be puzzled by a non standard behavior

3) It's faster.

By the way, it is a GNOME desktop on Debian 13.

Oops, I lied. I was about to click on Reply and I realized that the bottom panel (which on a standard GNOME is at the top) is on autohide with a short transition. Maybe because it's the only transition that I activate with the mouse pointer: I hit the bottom of the screen and while it's traveling the last pixels the bar starts sliding in. It's very fast.

Outside of dedicated notification areas, a GUI should only change state in response to user action. Because the user requested the state change, they naturally know how it changed. This means any animation is a redundant waste of time.

The notification area doesn't need animations either, because a GUI is only appropriate for displaying non-urgent notifications. If something really needs urgent attention, you need alarms and flashing lights, not an animated "toast".

Do you have some concrete examples?

"Back-in-the-days" you'd click and stuff would instantly happen, and I don't remember anything being more difficult to visually interpret.

On my Kubuntu desktop if I disable all animations (the whole compositor) I don't feel there is an increased cognitive load of rescaning things - but maybe it's my preexisting memory of the UIs and certain baked in UI expectations. Maybe this animated stuff helps people that are computer illiterate? (software made for the lowest common denominator)

This isn't true generally. I am personally far more comfortable with disabling smooth scroll. It has more to do with your mind's expectations. Which can vary between people. Some people expect smooth and others don't. Motion itself isn't necessary.

The only time I have to "rescan" is if I input a scroll and anticipate a scroll and it doesn't scroll. It has nothing to do with motion. In fact, in that case, I "rescan" even though the page hasn't changed, but because it doesn't match my expectation that it would change.

The OS shouldn't be making many big changes that force me to reorient. When I'm moving between different UIs I often want to compare them; animations make it harder to compare state A to state B. I can detect very fine differences between two images by switching between them within a second, if there's a 1-second animation it not only means it's going to add a second, it adds a bunch of visual noise which might make it impossible to be able to distinguish what's an actual difference and what's just noise introduced by the animation.

Ah yeah, that makes sense, but I still feel like there's room for a little more discretion.

https://tonsky.me/blog/every-frame-perfect/toolbar@2x.mp4, for example

I don't think I would have to rescan the entire page to figure out where things were afterwards. Everything's shifted to the right, just like when I open my browser bookmarks.

True in 3d CAD when switching between work planes. I can't think of another application.

>Motion is critical for reorientation after transition.

The only case I can think of where this is true is on scroll, and that barely counts as animation. Anything else is an irritating waste of time.

The absolute worst offence is animating page content on scroll. Great job making me wait on pointless nonsense while scanning your website for the bit I'm looking for. People who do this should be sent to reeducation camps. Both for the animation, and for disregarding 'prefers-reduced-motion'.