The end of the nice GTK button

Coming from that era, I strongly disagree. While I agree with the article, that some elements are harder to spot as interactable, I would still say that they are way more coherent than programs from W2K era and that one just got used to the broken design of the UIs of that era/platform.

While usually understanding the UI even in W2K, I don't think that the dumbing down of UI (and reducing palette/layers adds to that) for the dumb users is necessarily a bad thing. At the end of the day I am also a dumb user.

Actually using GTK3 for a while now and moving to GTK4 however might also trick me to not notice a downgrade in discoverability, so in that particular instance I might get tricked by getting used to a certain design language even if they simplify it to the point of actually decreasing UX for users that are unfamiliar with GTK compared to GTK3.

Things like having pull handles on both sides of a door that has to be pushed from one side. Or having no push plate on either side of a glass door. Do I push? Is it a sliding door that's not working? Don't know!

My car has the climate controls hidden behind a graphic of the current state on the stupid touch screen. It used to be buttons that had three zones for head, body and feet, a wheel for fan and a wheel for temp[1]. Volvo used to pride themselves on having controls you could use with gloves on, so all the buttons had 3D features and a positive press feel.

Now it's not even obvious the graphic is a button at all (it's also incredibly dangerous as you cannot do anything without a multi-click modal process with only visual feedback that you have to look at to use). Thankfully the window demister is still a physical button because that would be incredibly dangerous to hide behind a soft screen interface: when you need it you need it. However, it's lost its 3D profile and is now just a flat button.

My office has an amusing one: there's a door at each end of the building. The building is the same on both sides, neither side looks more "fronty" than the other, and the doors are the same. Only one of these is the main entrance. The door next to the car park (i.e. where anyone unfamiliar with the site will arrive) is not the main door. Therefore there are no call buttons. However, there's also no indication that there is another door on the other side. A whole building basically has no obvious start menu. Just...why do that?

[1] https://bparts-eu.s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/ftp/azor_2/000/...

The worst offender is the login prompt. In Gnome, from the lock screen, I simply start typing my password. As soon as I type the first letter of the password, the password prompt appears, and when I'm done I hit enter and it unlocks.

On Windows, the first letter merely makes the prompt appear, but does not yet type into the prompt. In fact, it will only start feeding letters into the prompt once the little prompt-appearing-animation has finished. If I just start typing my password, it will eat the first three or four letters. So I hit enter, wait for the animation to finish, and only then start typing.

That's not the end of the world, honestly. But it is a learned gesture that the system taught me by failing to do what I'd asked it to do. It just goes to show the attention to detail that makes a UI feel fluid and frictionless.

I'd argue that the flat 2D look is cool these days because it is different from the skeuomorphic 3D look we had before. It will look old and faded in a few years, and in the search for a fresh look, we'll rediscover a more tactile 3D look.

Anyway, I actually like the flat 2D style as well. It might be that many current programs are not doing it well merely because they haven't had much experience with it. This will sort itself out in a few years. Much like the super-skeuomorphic apps from a few years ago that included things like stitching and torn-off paper in calendar apps and notepad apps, respectively.