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The end of the nice GTK button

blog.brixit.nl

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Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#81

Post by Sunspark »

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…

The flatness of some UIs along with the removal of some visual cues has happened that I have tapped on things that aren't actually a button thinking that they might be one.

When I make my own apps one day, I am going to ignore design fads and only make intuitive interfaces.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#82

Post by woah »

Non techies have been using flat design interfaces for like a decade now and the world hasn't ended. If you personally like another style, totally fine. But it's odd that programmers always think they know more about usability than people who study it for a living.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#84

Post by woah »

capableweb wrote: post #72
azinman2 wrote: post #42

So basically the new GTK is iOS but without the professional designers behind it. What I cannot understand is how Canonical, Red Hat, or some rich SV person hasn’t thrown money at the problem and hired a big wig design firm or person to overhaul it all. Johnny Ive is now even available (if he’d take the project). But even going thru a site like dribbble there are so many amazing designers out there. To me it would be…

Easy for someone who works at Apple to say "just throw money at the problem" while there is so much more to consider. Design as a workflow for Open Source design (as in UI/UX) hasn't even been worked on that much. Ideally, open source contributors work on projects because they care about it, and want to improve it. I'm not sure how many designers are using GTK applications day-to-day to care enough about it to start…

Inherently, good design requires top down authority to force a consistent look, and implementing it requires a bunch of programmers to spend time on boring work. That just doesn't work well in open source where people only want to work on their own thing, sometimes, and in their own way.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#85

Post by librarylinux »

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…

No post body was provided.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#86

Post by snerbles »

bqmjjx0kac wrote: post #77
HeckFeck wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I have reverted to the CLI whenever possible. There's something deeply assuring knowing that I don't have to relearn my whole workflow every few months when the trends change. ls, grep, find, ps, htop will always be what they are. Even the Windows CLI is thankfully consistent. All I want is to get work done the way I want, and I've found the CLI is increasingly the path of least resistance.

I regret to inform you that the latest release of `find` has been renamed to [magnifying glass emoji]. For example, # Find directories the old way. find . -type d # The cool new way! [magnifying glass emoji] . -[keyboard] [folder emoji] Edit: HN appears to strip emojis, so my new edited comment doesn't pack the same punch.

I look forward to hieroglyphic CLI interfaces, where we compute like it's 2600 BC.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#87

Post by seltzered_ »

The other nice thing about "the nice GTK button" is that it feels consistent enough with the current tab buttons styling in Firefox: https://imgur.com/a/OEKc4So . It also just feels better for direct manipulation (touch).

Is there any way to vote for keeping it? Does 'high contrast' mode possibly bring it back?

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#88

Post by albert_e »

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…

This resonates so much with me .. especially the On/Off buttons where designers show off how cool and smooth they can make them look, usability be damned. Dark patterns especially around opt-ins uses these type of controls very well putting a lit of mental load on us to opt-out.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#89

Post by jraph »

It seems like KDE and Plasma is the place where look and feel is constantly but incrementally refined; we've been saved from this flat design trend so far and things keep looking pleasant and modern and being usable. We know they care, and have great attention to details because that's documented weekly [1].

I find the Breeze theme really well done and its GTK port, Brise, is also very nice, to the point Gnome looks good in it.

There was just the KDE 4 era where I didn't like Oxygen at all (and indeed I used to change the theme to Fusion there) but that's over. KDE 3 was fine and KDE 5 is great. At this point, most things that are not Breeze don't look great to me now.

As for the customization and theme support, that's supported and it works well, they prove that it's nothing insurmountable too. KDE comes with themes that look like Windows 95, Motif, Adwaita, GTK 2 and other things and you can download more if you want.

I'd be curious to have a review of Breeze / KDE by Martijn.

[1] https://pointieststick.com/

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#90

Post by xedrac »

hoistbypetard wrote: post #52

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.

I for one don't want the phone form factor to influence my desktop experience. They are two completely different workflows that have conflicting needs IMO.
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