On 5/17/2023 3:11:05 PM, Ander GM wrote:
Well, I use Emacs and that's the opposite of not-customizing, but not
for eye candy, but for functionality.
You're definitely not the only one...but I think the issue goes way deeper.
Back in the 1980s, a LOT of research was done to find the right balance of functionality and usability for computers. At the time, people were moving from 'not-computers' to 'computers', so they needed to do the job *way* better than the existing methods. IBM-compatible desktops cost some $3,000-$5,000 at the time, so it was the sort of sale that really needed to have functionality front-and-center.
Over the next 40 years, UIs got better looking and, in general, better usability
(though Snapchat's "secret UI" situation is a mess, and the absence of text labels is a terrible direction). This has certainly been a good thing (This is a
mess:
http://www.graphpaper.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/bru_main_screen.jpg), but
while letting developers make UIs without any oversight ends up with an ugly, undesirable mess, letting UI/UX people turn software into an art project that lacks the sort of consistent cues and elements needed to make software discoverable is an equally terrible extreme (
https://chromeunboxed.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/launcherWithBlur.png?ezimgfmt=ngcb93/notWebP).
Command line interface programs certainly do not have to be pretty, but there is
certainly room for improvement without needing a GUI overlay. We can easily talk
about Synaptic Package Manager. Recently I attempted to do an upgrade for something and it required me to accept that there was a version change. Well, it
gave me something I could copy/paste into Google and get moving, but under the circumstances, the better solution would be to say something like "this repository has a significant version change, so any updates from this repository
will not be added automatically. To update applications from this repository, run
this command again with the "--allow-releaseinfo-change" argument." . Save me the
Google search for such a consistent behavior.
Overall, I agree that desktop environments seem to be trending into either one extreme or the other. Either the UI is reflective of a room full of artists and no users (Windows 11, MacOS 11, recent KDE iterations), or it's a set of developers who are optimizing for the machine, rather than the person (Openbox).
I think LXDE and XFCE have a reasonable middle ground, but where most Linux desktop environments seem to falter is in their system config panels. For all of
the faults of Windows, changing the screen resolution and wallpaper are fairly easy to get to and intuitively so. Moving shortcuts from the Start Menu to the Desktop, while a regression in Windows 11, is way easier to do in Win9x-10 than it seems to be in most DEs.
..All of that being said, I would love nothing more than to be able to run KDE or XFCE on Windows...let me use a Linux UI with a Windows backend and I will be happy. Sadly, no such love, and I do understand why.
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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