I hoped, back in the early days of KDE, that F/OSS desktop environments would surpass OS X in usability.
I would like to thank all of the UI designers at #Apple who have worked so tirelessly in the intervening years to make this happen.
Discussion
I hoped, back in the early days of KDE, that F/OSS desktop environments would surpass OS X in usability.
I would like to thank all of the UI designers at #Apple who have worked so tirelessly in the intervening years to make this happen.
@david_chisnall Also, #KDE 6 devs:
"We have disrupted your muscle memory for taskbar context menu so we could place at the top 'Open new window' which is only relevant to 40% of GUI programs, displacing 'Move window to desktop N' which is relevant for 100%. We know that 23 years of habit can die hard, which is why we are doing this now – better late than never."
@david_chisnall I really appreciate all the hard work @scottjenson put into the UX 😁
UX-wise, there are four things that are my favorites:
- Telegram: I don't use it and not recommend using it but its UX is well thought out
- MacOS before Tahoe (especially the Leopard)
- Android Material Design
- GNOME HIG
@tris @david_chisnall There is NOTHING stopping us but our own interia (and general FOSS silliness when it come to UX design). I'd so like Linux distros to take a more aggressive approach to adding new UX flows/capabilities. We've been rather stuck for awhile now
@scottjenson Recent interesting blog post. Linux UX (and general UX) is one of my hobby horses. I feel like it's basically stagnated since Windows 7 and 10+ year old Android. In many ways it's gotten worse.
@scottjenson @david_chisnall I just made some points on GNOME: https://rootkitten.bearblog.dev/uiux-in-gnome/ :)
@david_chisnall so exactly like how AI is surpassing human intelligence...
@david_chisnall All the options are each terrible in their own way
To be clear, OS X was never perfect. 10.0 tried to merge the clean, consistent, NeXT UI with the clean, consistent, but very different Classic MacOS UI, and it failed in a bunch of awkward ways. The Finder being basically two different programs was especially bad.
But for the next few releases, a lot more things improved than got worse. There was a clear trajectory to better. When the iPhone came out, it used UIKit instead of AppKit, not just because it was a chance to break backwards compatibility but also because it was understood that small touchscreen devices needed completely different UIs to big mouse-and-keyboard devices. They avoided the UI disaster of Windows 8, trying to unify them and ending up with something that didn't work well on either.
But for most of the last 15 years, each new upgrade has been a question of 'what have they made worse this time?' Very few things have been made better, and a lot have been made worse.
@david_chisnall wonder what will happen next… 
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