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The Decline of Usability

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Re: The Decline of Usability

#471
post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tiling window managers are a pain without a keyboard.

What is this wacky computer that you and apparently all of the Gnome developers are using that doesn't have a keyboard? PCs have keyboards! It's the best part of the computer.

Mainly PoS machines.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#472
post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gnome and KDE are both worse than useless - They poison other, useful projects. There is never going to be a unified GUI for Linux; that requires a dictator. KDE tried to provide the carrot of development-ease, Gnome tried to generate some reality distortion, but nobody cared. Carrots don't work. As far as I'm concerned, the experiment is over and it is time to embrace the chaos. Now, this is easy for me to say, I'm…

Honestly the problem with all software is people trying to “innovate” too much. They made this thing called a book once upon a time and those have worked for centuries. Same thing with UIs: the stacking window managers work well from Windows 95 and XP why change it?

GNOME, Mate, Pantheon, XCFE, KDE, Deepin, UKUI, LXQt etc. created an unmaintainable mess of competing forks _while all using stacking window managers_. It's maddening how similar they all are to each other. Someone should build a dating site where understaffed Linux projects can find a matching project to merge with.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can't Google an icon. I've been complaining about that since 1983, when an Apple evangelist came to my workplace to show off the Mac's icons. Nobody was able to guess what the box of Kleenex icon was, much to the frustration of the evangelist. Of course, there wasn't a Google then, but how do you look up a picture in a dictionary? We've reverted to hieroglyphic languages. (Ironically, hieroglyphs evolved over t…

> Ironically, hieroglyphs evolved over time into phonetic meanings. No, they didn't. The original creators of hieroglyphs knew how to use them to spell phonetically, but they didn't do it that often, they were satisfied with the old system (just as Chinese are now). It was a job of other people, who actually didn't know how to use hieroglyphs properly, to build a functioning alphabet on top of them. Two systems coexi…

[deleted]

Re: The Decline of Usability

#475

I feel that "everything is a fullscreen application" is not such a bad idea, as I can't concentrate on more than one thing at a time regardless. The rest is just tabbing.

I could get very little work done if I couldn't reference something why working on something else. Often I need to reference more than one thing. I also may have a result I need to see separate from the source of that result I want to edit.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#476
post #382
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ubuntu got worse at 18.04. Only if you use the default UI, which I think is an important distinction to make: I use Window Maker and had no regressions. The ability to choose your own UI is an important strength of Unix, and one which distinguishes it from macOS and Windows.

> The ability to choose your own UI is an important strength of Unix, and one which distinguishes it from macOS and Windows. It's a strength as well as a curse for Linux distros not limited to just Ubuntu since the developer of a GUI program must test if their app works on your unique setup, if it doesn't run on one distro or your specific configuration out of the box, then that is already a usability issue. The Linu…

> The inability to "choose your on UI" on Windows and macOS guarantees that GUI programs will be consistent with the accessibility and look and feel features in the OS...

Except when it doesn't, which unfortunately is more and more often, to the extent that nowadays it feels it's most of the time. Which is the whole thesis of the web page that this discussion is about to begin with; just go back to it and contemplate that picture of the six window title bars again.

Personally, I blame Microsoft. After successfully having introduced and enforced the CUA guidelines, they themselves were the first to violate them on a large scale in a widely-used application (suite): MS Office’s “themed” interface from around the turn of the century. Sure, there were a bunch of MP3 players and stuff, probably inspired by that “kool” (=utterly unnecessarily weird) Kai thing — but AFAICS those were marginal, and Office was what “legitimised” applying non-standard frippery in stead of the simple unadorned standard UI elements.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#477
post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way people react to computers is similar to how many react to math. A lot of capable people are mathphobic, and it's strange to watch (as someone who took naturally to math). The expressions on the page (or the attempt to produce those expressions from a model in their mind) causes them to seize up. It's like watching an anxiety attack happen. Something about math (the subject, their experience when taking the co…

We definitely should see if we can develop math teaching which doesn't elicit that response, because it has to be learned. Humans aren't evolved to be good at arithmetic or symbolic thinking, but we're not evolved to be morbidly afraid of it, either. Of course, any attempt to improve math education gets screamed at ("New Math! Common Core! Blah!") and the whole thing just becomes political.

Commom core seems just fine overall to me. I wouldn't be surprised if the generation that grows up with it has much better math comprehension and number sense.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#478
post #10

Ubuntu got worse at 18.04. Logging in on desktop now requires "swiping up" with the mouse to get the password box. The "swiping" thing is to avoid problems with unwanted activation when the device is in your pocket. It's totally inappropriate to desktops. Then there's icon mania. I've recently converted from Blender 2.79 to Blender 2.82. Lots of new icons. They dim, they change color, they disappear as modes change,…

Ubuntu 19 is terrible. I was forced to use KDE (Plasma) instead because they broke so many basic UI concepts (to give you a tiny taste: changing tabs went from Ctrl+Tab to Meta+Tab, the keyboard layout switcher takes 2 seconds or more because it pops up a stupid little window to show the language selected, and many other things just like this I thankfully erased from my mind and now only the frustration remains).

Re: The Decline of Usability

#479
On desktops, I wish we could just stop wondering “where is that icon?” or “what does this icon do?” entirely.

We should be able to search for any feature within an application in a standardised way instead. Maybe something like what Ctrl-P does in Sublime Text / Sublime Merge.

If this shortcut would work for any application within the same OS, we could get rid of most icons by default, while adding more consistency at the same time!

Re: The Decline of Usability

#480

I feel that "everything is a fullscreen application" is not such a bad idea, as I can't concentrate on more than one thing at a time regardless. The rest is just tabbing.

I could get very little work done if I couldn't reference something why working on something else. Often I need to reference more than one thing. I also may have a result I need to see separate from the source of that result I want to edit.

Maybe the ability to display references should be a feature in your tool?

As for my experience from Blender, you either utilize its UI to display it where you want it or put the references directly into the scene. Its also common for 2D artists to just use layers on the canvas for keeping references.

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