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▲ bmurphy1976 7 hours ago

I want more stuff like this. The era 20 years ago (e.g. Enlightenment) was way more fun than the bland monotonic design we have these days. If you like bland modern design, great, that should be an option as well, but we should still have good variety.

▲Sohcahtoa82 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> If you like bland modern design, great,

I don't know why anybody would. It takes all the lessons we learned about UX from user testing in the late 90s/early 00s and throws it all away to produce something that looks "clean" and "sleek", at the cost of being useful. Discoverability? Who needs it?

EDIT: Though I do enjoy skeuomorphism, I do think the TFA goes a bit too far.

▲Zigurd 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Debatable. IIRC Bell labs conducted a study of whether Unix command names should be changed to something more meaningful than cat, sed, grep etc.

They found that words that convey some meaning related to what the command does had little or no effect on the user remembering what the command does. I strongly suspect skeuomorphism similarly has no claim on functional advantage.

Discoverability is good, but it's probably got a little to do with the icon.

▲lelanthran 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> I strongly suspect skeuomorphism similarly has no claim on functional advantage.

I think it does, but for new users only. I hate playing the "is-this-a-button" on modern designs, not knowing what is clickable and what is not. Other games I hate:

- Lets find the scrollbar

- Guess which window has focus

- (Windows-only) Try to predict the application to get focus on alt-tab, then alt-tab again.

- How do I find the file that just downloaded?

▲tavavex 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

A lot of these don't need skeuomorphism to be solved. It just needs clearer designs. Always showing vital elements like the scrollbar isn't a skeuomorphic choice, it's always a good idea, they only started hiding them because it looked 'cleaner' to some UI designer. The same with using color to show window focus, separate distinct elements or foreground from background. Nowadays everything is just white, but this is just a product of visual design trends, not (anti)skeuomorphism.

▲setopt 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Always showing vital elements like the scrollbar isn't a skeuomorphic choice, it's always a good idea, they only started hiding them because it looked 'cleaner' to some UI designer.

There’s a lot of modern design in not happy with, but this is not personally one of them. If I can’t autohide scrollbars I try to turn them permanently off instead of permanently on. For some reason I find them very distracting, and since I anyway use a scroll wheel or trackpad or keybindings, I don’t need it to scroll. (If it’s on autohide, I use it as a progress bar when actually scrolling.).

But there’s a lot of these weird things that seemingly everyone else accepts that just really throws off my focus. Blinking text cursor is another one, I just can’t get any work done until the blinking is off. If an app or OS can’t do that, I won’t use it.

▲thwarted 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> they only started hiding them because it looked 'cleaner' to some UI designer.

They started doing it on mobile in order to give more screen real estate to the content area. This was then translated to desktop apps at the same time desktop screen real estate became a non-issue for everyone (a 32" monitor at 1600x1200 used to be a luxury, now it's mundane). Now no one knows if there is anything "below the fold" without initiating a scroll action, which just encourages people to further only focus on the above the fold content.

Interestingly the response to that was sites adding horizontal "progress bars" across the top of the viewport to indicate how much you had read. And with application and website control of the styling and operation of these standard widgets, everyone is slightly different, which increases time to become familiar.

It's been a race to the bottom, in the name of (the subjective at best) "clean design".

▲Lumich an hour ago | parent | next [-]

« This was then translated to desktop apps at the same time desktop screen real estate became a non-issue for everyone »

Exactly. I remember opening a Metro/TIFKAM app for the first time on my new Windows 8 connected to my new 27" QHD monitor, and then staring in bewilderment as it went fullscreen and 95 % of the screen was just monochrome with nothing on it at all.

Wtf were they thinking? That I would enjoy vanilla sauce on my roastbeef because they weren't serving strawberries yet?

Still puzzling to me how such a multi-billion $ company can fuck up so hard.

▲Fr0styMatt88 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I feel like wide screens and ultra-wide screens are massively under-utilised in UX design and there’s a lot of untapped potential there.

▲marginalia_nu an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Skeumorphism isn't necessary for consistency in user interfaces, but it generally ensures a level of consistency that is honestly hard in modern interface design.

▲mcv 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Absolutely. I keep falling into these traps. I just got a Mac, and it's terrible at these. It's notorious for hiding the scrollbar, but why would they make it hard to find the thing I just downloaded? Or a screenshot I just took? I can open it, but that doesn't take me to the file location so I can actually do something with it. Although Steam is by far the worst at that.

It's almost as if we didn't learn anything about UX in the past 30 years.

▲andai 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

UX was mastered 31 years ago. The intervening years have been a nosedive.

▲Fr0styMatt88 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What do you mean about Steam?

▲encom 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>Lets find the scrollbar

Related: Whoever decided to allow to websites style browser scroll bars, should have their teeth kicked in.

▲santoshalper 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yeah, those are all legit gripes about modern operating system UX, but none of them are automatically fixed with skeuomorphism, and none of them couldn't be fixed with clearer design regardless of approach.

▲Sohcahtoa82 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> none of them are automatically fixed with skeuomorphism

True.

But they absolutely need to stop hiding functionality in order to present a "clean" interface.

Sure, I've seen some cluttered interfaces. I recently launched LibreOffice Calc and damn there were a lot of buttons on that toolbar (I may be using an insanely old version).

But like...disappearing scrollbars makes zero sense and should never have been implemented on any interface.

▲dylan604 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> disappearing scrollbars makes zero sense and should never have been implemented on any interface.

My biggest gripe about the disappearing scrollbars is the layout shifting that can occur when the content changes making the scrollbar necessary or not. CSS has a few options that can take care of that, but it requires some digging for someone to discover them.

▲red_admiral 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Guess which window has focus

Used to be a solved problem before some ** messed it up. I hate that game too.

▲WesolyKubeczek 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

- Should there even be a scrollbar?

Many apps present content in such a way that makes it impossible to tell if there is anything more on the screen until you actually try to scroll. The home screen of the app is so clean and so fitted that there is nothing poking out from the bottom.

▲dylan604 3 hours ago | parent [-]

oh gawd, please please please do not interpret this as pagination of windows with overflowing content!

the image carousel type dots or similar old skool pagination indicators are so much worse than a simple scroll bar.

▲thesuitonym 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Skeuomorphism isn't the only thing we've lost, and really it's the least important. We're talking smaller ideas, like widgets that aren't just black text on a white background (or if you like dark mode, white text on a grey background), visible scrollbars, menus.

▲andy81 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I love knowing that a "Get-Foo" function in a library I've never before isn't going to have side-effects (unless malicious).

Conventions are great for UX.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/devel...

▲AlienRobot 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That has nothing to do with discoverability. Discoverability isn't about "guessing" it's about being able to see it.

Discoverability in CLI is --help. But you can't discover you have to use --help. So CLI is always fundamentally worse than GUI.

▲topaz0 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It helps that for most cli tools, any incorrect usage will show the usage text, including --help

▲robotresearcher 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You also have to just know what program to invoke with the —help arg.

Good luck guessing ‘grep’ from first principles.

▲topaz0 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Man -k is often good for this

▲roughly 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Re: too far - it’s interesting, because there’s two reasons skeumorphism “works” - one is because it provides visual cues for how a virtual object will behave when acted upon, which lets our brain build a quick intuitive understanding of how to interact with a foreign object that draws on all our experience outside the computer, and two is because the visual mimicry of the physical object gives our brains immediate cues to understand what it’s seeing and build that interaction model.

This one absolutely over indexes on that second principle, to a borderline cartoonish degree, but I expect the reason it’s resonating so hard is exactly what you’re indicating, that in the industry’s desire to be able to move on from the tether to the shapes of physical objects, they discarded that first principle entirely, instead of figuring out how to maintain the visual cues to form and operation in a new language.

(Here’s where I throw away all that credibility I just got from the prior two paragraphs: I actually think Liquid Glass is getting closer to a “skeumorphism without skeumorphism” than anything else I’ve seen out there.)

▲GuB-42 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The UX disaster is not just about looking "clean" and "sleek". It is all about mobile. The choice between bland colored boxes, skeuomorphism and other styles is just looks, it doesn't change the fundamentals.

Here is the problem: smartphones have a small screens and are operated using fat fingers, so you need big buttons and you don't have much space, so you are very limited in the amount of stuff you can put on screen. It also means there is a lot of hidden stuff.

Now that having a mobile app, or a mobile optimized website is often a requirement, the desktop app usually follows the mobile conventions, which is not great, but better than doing it the other way. Having two entirely different apps to make the best use of the platform is possible, but it is expensive, and you want to maintain some level of consistency, so that users switching between desktop and mobile won't be lost. You probably want to maintain branding too.

To me, it is not that designers don't know how to do good UX like they did in the 90s/00s, it is that there are contradictory requirements and they have to make compromises.

▲prmph 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Modern design is not synonymous to dis-empowering design.

FWIW I love modern design, and I hate all these too clever skeuomorphs. Modern design is honest to the digital medium. I find its beauty lies, not in the quirky ways it tries to mimic real textures and objects, but by how it provides usable controls and information by applying basic design elements like spacing, alignment, color, typography, discovery, layered info density, etc. well.

None of these requires skeuomorphs. It is like the difference between thinking a website is visually impressive and stunning because it uses a nice background image. That would not impress me. What would impress me are stuff like: does it have an effective information architecture, as reflected in it main menu and general link structure? Does it use a tasteful and usable color scheme? Does it have an interesting and still usable visual grouping? Etc.

▲hotsauceror 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I fully agree with this take. I don't think of a monitor / desktop as a tool that I interact with like I would a hammer; there is nothing intuitive about "open this high-definition representation of a day planner by clicking a button with your thumb on this little round plastic box somewhere else." I simply do not understand the appeal of skeumorphism, frankly I think these things look tacky but that is just my preference.

My interactions are with content, generally as strings of text but often as picture/video/audio. I prefer that my 'desktop' apply the principles you've mentioned, to the problem of tastefully and comfortably arranging, displaying, and manipulating that content, and little else. Some types of controls that lean skeuomorphic, like sliders or switches, may be useful and even intuitive in that endeavor; others, like an analog knob or dial, aren't. If I want to watch a video, display it in a minimal, tasteful frame; I do not need a representation of an old 1970s wooden TV or something.

▲asanineassasin 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]

▲pkulak 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I don't know why anybody would.

Well, there's really two things going on here: consumer vs professional. Does an electrician need to "discover" the modes on her multimeter? Naw. Do I need to discover where the wiper controls are on the car I just rented? Absolutely! But I'm not a huge fan of UI fluff that helps me discover things on my work machine.

▲necovek 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

All the multimeters I've seen had pretty bog standard markings for AC and DC resistance, voltage and current. While not an electrician myself, I think one would be pretty annoyed if a "designer" invented new graphics for alternating current or resistance. They might even gotten hurt or damaged some equipment.

So when consistent UX is applied, both a professional and amateur alike can learn and trust that what they learned carries over.

▲Loquebantur 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The idea of "one size fits all" was never true.

Weirdly, there is some kind of power play happening with OS UI: "MBA finally in position of influence wants to force their taste on everybody" appears to be a thing.

▲Uncle_Brumpus 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Your rental car comment reminds me of the time I looked like an idiot trying to open the fuel door on a rented Kia K5 for almost 20 minutes. I don't have a smartphone and didn't have my laptop so had no way to look anything up. Ended up finding this video on the gas station employee's phone (she came out to see if everything was okay. It was not okay.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_e7lZmbjtNo

If you have to release a tutorial video to open your fuel filler door, and that video includes the one easy piece of user interface to do the thing getting thanos-snapped out of existence, I think you did something wrong.

The cause of my problem was I opened the driver's door before turning off the car. The rental didn't have push-to-start like my personal vehicle, and I don't have "turn and remove key" on the mind when exiting a vehicle. Even locking and unlocking the door didn't unlock the fuel door, I had to turn the car back on, lock the doors, turn the car off, then unlock the doors. Why is opening the fuel door so complicated? There doesn't seem to be any way to do it mechanically, so good luck when the solenoid dies.

▲Fr0styMatt88 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Hahahaha the first time I tried to get into a Tesla and couldn’t figure out how to open the doors from the outside.

▲OroPla 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Discoverability? Who needs it?

It wouldn't be so important if things didn't change so much over the years. The CLI has stayed fairly consistent over the past 40 or so years. Can't say the same about GUI, though.

I wouldn't have to rediscover all functionality if designers didn't shuffle things around for no reason. Though, that's mostly a Windows thing, which I have to use for work.

▲roarcher 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Do all those toggle switches and dials and sliders actually help discovery for people who grew up with iPads? Maybe their function is only obvious to us dinosaurs.

▲Fr0styMatt88 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Ha I feel like modern interior design and apartment design does exactly the same thing these days. Everything looks the same kind of bland.

▲manoDev 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

These lessons made sense for users born before personal computers, but it's debatable if these lessons are transferable to so called "digital native" users.

▲creaturemachine 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Way too far. I don't want my desktop to look like a puzzle straight out of Myst, or a reinvention of Bob.

▲rerdavies 4 hours ago | parent [-]

In fairness, this is Myst not Bob.

▲sleepybrett 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think it depends on audience. I think there is a place for the 'Microsoft Bob' s of the world. My 90+ year old grandma would probably use a computer if we sanded down all the hard edges and kept her in a box (computationally speaking). Hell my 70+ year old mother, even though she's had a computer for 35ish years prefers her ipad for just that reason (simpler than her hand-me-down macbooks i keep her supplied with).

▲VCFundedGenYer 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Discoverability? Who needs it?

Most "flat" designed modern apps fail miserably at discovery. Most hide things in hamburger menus or require weird random swipes in odd directions with zero visual indicators.

▲thwarted 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I got bit by this recently. Brave on android has no "forward button in the app menu, it only has back. Chrome has both forward and back in the menu. Both browsers support swiping from the right side to go forward in the history stack (although this seems to be overloaded with switching tabs in a tab group), which I discovered by accident. What's odd about this though is that the device has a global back button that is also used for backward history navigation, but that's been duplicated in brave with an additional back action in the menu, but the forward history navigation is entirely hidden and has only one way to invoke it: via swiping.

▲pkulak 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

As someone who runs a super-boring, stock tiler with zero decoration or bling; couldn't agree more. It's this kind of thing that gets new users interested in Linux. _I_ started using Linux because I saw some video of wobbly windows, and desktops on a giant rotating cube.

▲Symbiote 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

KDE 6, at least as the latest Kubuntu has it configured, has the wobble back by default.

It hasn't annoyed me enough to disable it just yet, but it's only been a week.

▲ibizaman 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Me too! I was drawn to trying out Ubuntu from seeing all the cool Compiz effects.

▲imp0cat 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I still run the Burn My Windows Gnome extension on all my desktops with a short "TV Effect" activated when a windows closes. It's just perfect!

https://github.com/schneegans/burn-my-windows

▲theraido 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's probably not the same one, but I suddenly had Project Looking Glass flashbacks

▲creaturemachine 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That was Compiz iirc. I remember turning it on for a laugh.

▲anonzzzies 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I look back at my Enlightenment desktop with joy. I guess many people hated all the tinkering with drivers & settings etc, but I loved it. Spending a few weekends getting a computer running with Linux and Enlightenment exactly like I wanted it to and then actually using that as my main driver for years are very nice memories.

▲lelanthran 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Spending a few weekends getting a computer running with Linux and Enlightenment exactly like I wanted it to and then actually using that as my main driver for years are very nice memories.

Years? The novelty wore off in a week with Enlightenment's constant crashing :-(

Anyway, I look forward to more Window Managers (Hell, even a whole DE) that put the fun and whimsy back into computing.

▲seba_dos1 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I used to use e17 on my daily driver phone. Illume was a nice UI, but you (or your distro) did have to find a good revision to not have it crash indeed :)

▲lelanthran 4 hours ago | parent [-]

My distro was Slackware, prior to any sort of package management, so, yeah, things would crash, but IIRC, Enlightenment, as much as I loved the use, look and feel, just crashed way too often.

▲seba_dos1 3 hours ago | parent [-]

   *** Eina Magic Check Failed !!!
       Input handle pointer is NULL !
   *** NAUGHTY PROGRAMMER!!!
   *** SPANK SPANK SPANK!!!
   *** Now go fix your code. Tut tut tut!
▲Symbiote 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What stops you from using it now?

▲Gualdrapo 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Call me insane but I still think xfce and Enlightenment should do a fusion become one project. Get rid of the GNOME shenanigans on GTK and rewrite all xfce apps and stuff in the e libraries.

▲andai 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>if you like bland, that should be an option too

That's the main thing we lost, isn't it? Options. I remember playing with so many different themes back in the day.

▲Beijinger 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What do you mean 20 years ago? I still use enlightenment today (Moksha Desktop)

▲lelanthran 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> What do you mean 20 years ago? I still use enlightenment today (Moksha Desktop)

Enlightenment today (https://www.enlightenment.org/_media/aa/shot-2021-12-13_17-4...) looks nowhere nearly as cool as it used to:

https://imgur.com/enlightenment-are-we-posting-throwbacks-de...

http://robert.thegeakes.co.uk/images/elive.jpg

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:E17_screenshot.jpg

https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/fq4y3c/e17_found_...

▲mahboi 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The one today doesn't look skeuomorphic at all

▲jacobgkau 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Is it just a default theme difference, or is the current version actually less themable?

Also, the person you replied to mentioned Moksha; that's a fork of Enlightenment 17 (which is what at least two of your cool-looking example screenshots appear to be from).

▲WD-42 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If the 23oz Of Glass or Orange Juice themes are usable I’ll switch right now

▲javier2 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

e16/e17 was a lot of fun, and it was fast.

▲Beijinger 6 hours ago | parent [-]

e17 (Moksha) IS still fun!

https://www.bodhilinux.com/moksha-desktop/

▲0xbadcafebee 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I would like a Linux desktop that doesn't suck first, then they can make it pretty. Every Linux desktop I've used in the past decade is either so minimal it's barely usable, or so feature-filled it takes up gigs of ram, or in the middle with broken clunky features (where I am now with LXQt). And the worst thing is, it's all the same goddamn thing as what we had 20 years ago, but somehow keeps getting rewritten to be slower and suckier.

▲TFNA 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I installed Debian with KDE on a couple of non-techy relatives' mid-range laptops around Covid, and in spite of KDE being notorious for its abundance of features, neither of those relatives have ever complained about slowness or lag. That era seems far in the past now.

▲dv35z 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Give Mint Debian a try - I've been very happy with it.

https://linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php