Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The end of the nice GTK button

blog.brixit.nl

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 666 posts

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#51

Post by fxtentacle »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #26

You can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. (You can't break the back of modularity-induced fragmentation and make a consistent GUI without making a few people unhappy with the UI design that the majority chose). That is Gnome. Gnome has become a top-down project that values consistency/coherency over modularity/theming. It's an extreme, and I suspect that they went too far, but with it comes a number of…

No, this will just fragment app developers into those that use GTK4 and those that keep using GTK3.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#52

Post by hoistbypetard »

The old button was good in the desktop context, but I can't get behind this point:

> The design even works very well on Linux phone formfactors.

The author must mean something very different when they say "works very well" than I do when I say that. As much as I want it to, nothing about GTK works well in a phone form factor, IME. I look forward to continued improvement that will make that statement incorrect.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#53

Post by zozbot234 »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #26

You can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. (You can't break the back of modularity-induced fragmentation and make a consistent GUI without making a few people unhappy with the UI design that the majority chose). That is Gnome. Gnome has become a top-down project that values consistency/coherency over modularity/theming. It's an extreme, and I suspect that they went too far, but with it comes a number of…

Gtk+ 3 with a custom theme allowed for a unified visual style across all desktop environments, not just GNOME. I could use a MATE- or Xfce-bundled app and not have it look out of place in a GNOME desktop, or vice versa. It's sad to lose this because of a combination of pointless churn and active hostility ("don't theme my app") to outside efforts that might improve the ecosystem.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#54

Post by von_lohengramm »

mikl wrote: post #43
von_lohengramm wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any font rendering looks amazing on HiDPI panels. Have you ever used macOS on a normal monitor? The text looks worse than anything else.

For some value of “normal”. 4K (or better) monitors have long since become the choice for most of those who cares about how font rendering looks. After a decade of “retina” screens, I’m ruined, I can’t stand the look of anti-aliased fonts, whether Windows, Linux or macOS.

> 4K (or better) monitors have long since become the choice for most of those who cares about how font rendering looks.

This is the hardware solution to something that can be solved in software. If your game is laggy, of course upgrading to a 3090 is going to help, but that doesn't mean you're solving the problem.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#55

Post by adhesive_wombat »

SkeuomorphicBee wrote: post #15

I agree 100% with the author, the old GTK button was gorgeous, it will be missed. > I have had to explain to people tons of times that the random word in the UI somewhere in an application is actually a button they can press to invoke an action. This is one of my biggest complaints with the super flat modern designs. Many widgets lost their skeuomorphic depth, which encoded a lot if visual information (the clickabili…

I spend far too long in GTK apps looking for the right menu to do basic stuff. It's like someone once saw an iPad from across a room and tried to implement what they remembered of it.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#56

Post by mceachen »

dheera wrote: post #47
SkeuomorphicBee wrote: post #15

I agree 100% with the author, the old GTK button was gorgeous, it will be missed. > I have had to explain to people tons of times that the random word in the UI somewhere in an application is actually a button they can press to invoke an action. This is one of my biggest complaints with the super flat modern designs. Many widgets lost their skeuomorphic depth, which encoded a lot if visual information (the clickabili…

UIs go through 3D and 2D in phases. Windows 2.0 - 3.1: 2D Windows 95 - 7: 3D Windows 8 - 10: 2D MacOS 6 - 7: 2D MacOS 8 - 10: 3D MacOS 11: 2D As a side point, I predict Sheriff and Sans-Sheriff fonts to also go into similar phases too though over a longer time scale. We're in a very long Sans-Sheriff phase now but I think Sheriff will be "in" in 20 years.

FWIW, Macintosh System 6 was just black and white (and only 640x480px), so 3D wasn't really tenable.

System 7 and 8 had support for color, and was as 3D as it could muster, like highlight and shadow treatment on buttons and other widgets, and embossed, draggable thumbs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_7#/media/File:Mac_OS_7....

Mac OS X brought Aqua, which was a pinnacle of 3D and skeuomorphic design. You know you're going hard for 3D when you add a drop shadow on all the text in your menubar:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_10.0#/media/File:MacO...

(and that IE logo in the dock wasn't there as a joke: it really was the best browser for OS X until Safari was a thing, years later)

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#57

Post by ejolto »

dheera wrote: post #47
SkeuomorphicBee wrote: post #15

I agree 100% with the author, the old GTK button was gorgeous, it will be missed. > I have had to explain to people tons of times that the random word in the UI somewhere in an application is actually a button they can press to invoke an action. This is one of my biggest complaints with the super flat modern designs. Many widgets lost their skeuomorphic depth, which encoded a lot if visual information (the clickabili…

UIs go through 3D and 2D in phases. Windows 2.0 - 3.1: 2D Windows 95 - 7: 3D Windows 8 - 10: 2D MacOS 6 - 7: 2D MacOS 8 - 10: 3D MacOS 11: 2D As a side point, I predict Sheriff and Sans-Sheriff fonts to also go into similar phases too though over a longer time scale. We're in a very long Sans-Sheriff phase now but I think Sheriff will be "in" in 20 years.

Sheriff? I think you mean serif, partner.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#58

Post by [deleted] »

ejolto wrote: post #57
dheera wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UIs go through 3D and 2D in phases. Windows 2.0 - 3.1: 2D Windows 95 - 7: 3D Windows 8 - 10: 2D MacOS 6 - 7: 2D MacOS 8 - 10: 3D MacOS 11: 2D As a side point, I predict Sheriff and Sans-Sheriff fonts to also go into similar phases too though over a longer time scale. We're in a very long Sans-Sheriff phase now but I think Sheriff will be "in" in 20 years.

Sheriff? I think you mean serif, partner.

[deleted]

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#59

Post by [deleted] »

mholt wrote: post #7

The flat UI trend baffles me. The removal of text from icons and buttons baffles me. For example, in Windows 11 I spent close to a minute looking for "Rename" in the right-click menu in Windows Explorer. Turns out it's not there! It's been removed out of the flow of the list and put in the top of the right-click menu, behind a small, picture-only icon that I've never seen before. MacOS is guilty of this too: Buttons…

[deleted]

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#60

Post by fsiefken »

dheera wrote: post #47
SkeuomorphicBee wrote: post #15

I agree 100% with the author, the old GTK button was gorgeous, it will be missed. > I have had to explain to people tons of times that the random word in the UI somewhere in an application is actually a button they can press to invoke an action. This is one of my biggest complaints with the super flat modern designs. Many widgets lost their skeuomorphic depth, which encoded a lot if visual information (the clickabili…

UIs go through 3D and 2D in phases. Windows 2.0 - 3.1: 2D Windows 95 - 7: 3D Windows 8 - 10: 2D MacOS 6 - 7: 2D MacOS 8 - 10: 3D MacOS 11: 2D As a side point, I predict Sheriff and Sans-Sheriff fonts to also go into similar phases too though over a longer time scale. We're in a very long Sans-Sheriff phase now but I think Sheriff will be "in" in 20 years.

Windows 3.0/3.1 buttons are quite 3D, perhaps you meant the flat Windows 2.0 buttons? http://toastytech.com/guis/win31.html https://www.howtogeek.com/674574/windows-3.0-is-30-years-old...
Post reply on HN