Ask Slashdot: Unity/Gnome 3/Win8/iOS — Do We Really Hate All New GUIs? 1040
Brad1138 writes "You see complaints about the 'next gen' GUI's all over the place, but do we really all hate them? Personally, I don't like them — I tried very hard to like Unity in Ubuntu 11.04/11.10 before giving up and switching to Mint (I am very happy there currently). But is it the vocal minority doing all the complaining, or is it the majority? Are we just too set in our ways?"
Re:It's change for the sake of change (Score:3, Informative)
Lion represented a modest but decent upgrade in many respects. However, in their effort to bring the "benefits" of iOS to the desktop they rather dropped the ball.
Their new "Full Screen Mode" is great, I suppose, on an iPad. On a desktop system with two monitors, like my workstation, it is worse that useless because it fills one screen but blanks the other. I end up with less working space than I had when I began.
The new scrollbars are an interface disaster. You should never make scrollbars smaller and harder to see and use, but that's what they did. They are about half as wide as before, and gray instead of in color. Not only that, but by default they disappear after a few seconds, and you have to hover your mouse on the edge of the window to get it back. I'm sure that saves valuable space on a tiny screen but in a desktop work environment it's just plain bad design, and worse: a waste of time because you have to hover and wait for it all the time. In very long documents, people are used to looking at their scrollbar to keep track of where they are. With the default behavior, you can't do that anymore.
You can set the scrollbars to not disappear, but they're still narrow, gray, and hard to see.
They added a couple of gestures to the Magic Trackpad, but at the same time took a couple of my favorite gestures away.
For certain OS X applications, they changed the behavior to something far from the norm, by making documents auto-save, even when you don't want them to. Now, when you quit an app without saving changes (there are a great many scenarios that call for this), you may find that your changes were saved anyway, against your wishes. You can usually revert them back to the state you wanted, but that in itself is a maddeningly slow and unresponsive process, with a poor interface.
The Finder, which is the equivalent of Explorer in Windows or a file browser in Linux, is now not just significantly but aggravatingly slower than it was before. And another elementary interface blunder: the sidebar icons, which used to be in color, are now a washed-out shade of gray.
All in all, for the desktop, OS X Lion (10.7) is quite a bit less "user-friendly" than OS X Snow Leopard (10.6) was. All for the purposes of making their OS interfaces "more consistent". They should have worked harder to bring desktop functionality to their smaller devices, rather than dumbing down the desktop to the "lowest common denominator".
Re:It's change for the sake of change (Score:4, Informative)
Gone are the nested menus. Instead of "gnome-foot"/"start-button"/"K" -> System -> Whatever-You-Want-To-Run, you now have something like this:
Everything you wrote is spot-on, except the part here about the "K". KDE is the one heavyweight Linux DE that hasn't drunk the one-UI-for-every-device kool-aid. The "K" menu is still there in the latest 4.7 release, and it isn't going anywhere. Furthermore, there's actually multiple UIs you can select in KDE; the default one for desktop PCs is "plasma-desktop" (you can see it running with "ps"). But if you're running a netbook, there's a different one that's optimized for netbooks, called "plasma-netbook". There's more coming for other devices (namely tablets; I don't think we'll see KDE on any phones soon; the tablet one will be touch-oriented as you'd expect). Unlike the other morons, the KDE guys have a totally different philosophy: they believe that different devices should have different UIs, though they can use most of the same underlying libraries and other software services.
Say what you will about KDE and their 4.0 screw-up, nepomuk, etc., but in this area, they have exactly the right idea.
Spot on. I installed KDE on one of my Linux boxes and really liked it. I installed Trinity on another Linux box and may even like that more. We'll see how it stands up to more use.
Re:Not necessarily. (Score:4, Informative)
So use multiple monitors and maximize your windows - one per monitor. Problems solved and productivity jumps.
Please explain to my boss that I need more than a dozen monitors to be more productive. Yes, I use that many windows and often twice that at the same time, and no, they can not be tiled either. If I can't have overlapping windows in a sane way (i.e. no auto-raise focused window), I lose productivity. Cause I really do need dozens of simultaneous windows without the risk of forgetting any of them.
Re:People also hated... (Score:4, Informative)
I'm guessing people hated Windows 95 when compared to 3.1 (or equivalent Mac OS version changes).
Everyone I knew thought Windows 95 was great; even those who used Suns had to admit that it was better in many respects.
Because... drum roll please... IT WAS A BETTER UI THAN THOSE THAT PRECEDED IT.
People don't hate change, they hate SHIT THAT'S WORSE THAN WHAT THEY'VE GOT ALREADY.
Which part of this is so hard to understand? Why, instead of three clicks to start a program from a menu or two clicks to start it from a desktop icon, will be life be better if I have to move the mouse to the corner of the screen, wait for some stupid animation to bring up a full-screen overlay, hunt down some random icon which I hope is the right program or take my hand off the mouse to type in what I hope is the name of the program and then probably wait for some more stupid animations while it starts up? What problem is this solving? Why is this supposed to be better?
The Win95 interface was the best thing Microsoft ever did for computing, which is why pretty much everyone else has copied it. GUI design has mostly been downhill since then.