The end of the nice GTK button • Hacker News Board

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#411

Post by berkes » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 9:24 AM UTC

solatic wrote: post #363

johnqian wrote: post #264

I'm going to take a risk here and say that I'm a designer who generally likes flat design. I see a lot of hate here against flat design, and it makes sense. A lot of designers abuse it, making their UIs ambiguous. It's probably true that if flat design was never conceived, UIs would be less confusing on average. But it's clearly possible to do flat design well. iOS is mostly flat, but it's quite beautiful and user fr…

> Why do we need to remove unneeded clues, you ask? To make room for more important things. If Instagram was littered with gradient buttons and blue underlined links, they'd draw attention away from the real content, the pictures. If Figma had too much personality, it'd influence users' designs. This is an oversimplification and not always correct in all situations. Take the original article as an example. How did 3D…

> A lot of designers abuse it, making their UIs ambiguous.

...

> This is an oversimplification and not always correct in all situations.

You are both saying the same thing, I guess. grandparent states that it is "possible to do flat design well" and gives examples (Apple). I don't have anyhting Apple, don't like it, but I do find their designs awe-inspiring.

To me, this comes from their investment in detail. The issues you describe "Does making "New List" a flat button and thus barely distinguishable" is real and an example of bad design. Not a proof that all flat-design always is bad. It shows that too little time and effort was poored into this piece.

I'm not sure how I would fix this particular issue. But I'm confident that within the contstraints of "flat design" and time and effort (investment) in details, this is solvable.

I'm also confident that without the constraints of flat-design, the time and effort needed would be far less. But here we are.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#412

Post by red_admiral » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 9:25 AM UTC

I miss the days of GTK2 when you could set colours for things individually without having to edit CSS. You could take the buttons from this theme and the window borders from that one, and then make the active window title bar a different colour to the rest. Moving to GTK3/adwaita made that a lot harder for me - like yes I can spend a couple of hours editing and testing changes to the stylesheet but before there was a button in the settings for this.

Look, I get all the advantages of the newer way, but for me it's a feature that I can make my UI look the way I want it, even if that's not the same as some theme designer's preferences.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#413

Post by _abox » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 9:25 AM UTC

Not a fan of adwaita at all, I think everything GTK is too wasteful in terms of screen space. I think Qt is much more efficient. But that's why we have Linux. Everyone can make their own choices

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#414

Post by lovedaddy » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 9:26 AM UTC

Flat I can just about tolerate, the stupid padding round every single element is what bugs me.

There has been loads of studies showing the amount of mistakes in coding or spreadsheet type work goes up massively with having to scroll windows, but yet, gtk3/4 is a bloated, oversized mess.

Mice precision has increased, so why on earth do we need toolbars that can take upto 1/8th a 768p screen. Stupid.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#415

Post by berkes » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 9:29 AM UTC

jraph wrote: post #89

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…

How is KDE these days?

I abandoned KDE during the KDE-3 (edit: to 4) migration apocalypse, when nothing worked as it did before, or at all, and everything looked like it needed at least another year of refinement.

Is this settled and past now? Is KDE still adament on making virtually every other pixel configurable?

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#416

Post by ogogmad » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 9:30 AM UTC

Superficial opinion: GNOME 3 is the best-looking DE for Linux, but I personally prefer using KDE. It's a shame then that the new flat design in GTK 4 looks ugly. I suppose it's all subjective -- but I'm struck by how viscerally bad most flat designs look to me. I suppose it's another "aesthetic movement" that most of us philistines won't understand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brutalist_architecture

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#417

Post by qalmakka » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 9:31 AM UTC

Aisen8010 wrote: post #149

jraph wrote: post #89

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…

I would not be so sure. Sooner or later there will be a QT6 port and most of the work will be lost. I was a happy GNOME user before the version 3 fiasco. It took years to have a usable GNOME desktop again.

GNOME 3 was a fiasco not because of GTK+ 3. It was a fiasco because they threw 12 years of work and UI/UX design in the rubbish bin instead of thinking of ways to improve on it. MATE now runs on GTK+ 3 and it's leaps and bounds better in terms of UX compared with GNOME > 3. Sure, GNOME now has all the eyecandy and stuff, but it still sucks hard compared to GNOME 2. GNOME 2 was the pinnacle of UX IMHO, it was a novel design that really showed that you could innovate without copying others, that there was a third possible way that was not either a Dock or a start menu. All wasted, I suppose.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#418

Post by qalmakka » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 9:32 AM UTC

bmn__ wrote: post #321

nyanpasu64 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Breeze is being ported to Qt 6, and from the screenshots I see ( https://www.volkerkrause.eu/2022/01/15/kf6-continuous-integr... , unsure what others), there are no visual changes so far. Time will tell if they change Breeze's appearance further before/after Plasma 6's release (I didn't ask about KDE's current plans). One possibility is O2 ( https://pinheiro-kde.blogspot.com/ ), a reworked theme by the author of KDE…

> Qt 6 […] there are no visual changes so far That's false, examine Strawberry 1.0.2 running in KDE 5. The menus have the wrong background colour. The font size is wrong.

That's because there's no Breeze theme for Qt 6, so it's using the builtin Fusion theme which is literal cow dung. If you port your theme to Qt 6, the app should look identical.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#419

Post by paldepind2 » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 9:35 AM UTC

jraph wrote: post #89

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…

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

He mentions KDE in the blog post:

> The feedback I get is that I should move to QT/KDE, but I think that theming has had the same issues for way longer already and I do really like the Gnome HIG.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#420

Post by OrderlyTiamat » Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 9:39 AM UTC

d1sxeyes wrote: post #375

Derbasti wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In modern Windows, press Win-key and start to type, oops, it missed the first keypresses, presented the completely wrong results and made a mess of your workflow. 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…

> 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. Although I agree this is annoying, to be completely fair, it doesn't suggest that you should start typing your password immediately. You could also start typing 'news.ycombinator.com' and it wouldn't browse to HN, but you wouldn't say that it failed to do what you asked it to. A…

I... am sorry, but I think that is extremely bad practice. You should not put yourself in that position, and your experience in that position does not excuse the design flaws in windows.

> You could also start typing 'news.ycombinator.com' and it wouldn't browse to HN, but you wouldn't say that it failed to do what you asked it to.

Well firstly, that isn't what the prompt is for, so I'm struggling to see the relevance. However it is a good example for me- When I type C-l right now, I can _immediately_ start typing 'news.ycombinator.com'. There is no delay, no animation, nothing. I didn't go through a learning experience of finding out how long I should wait before typing- it's just ready.

Fundamentally: _why_ should I have been "taught" anything about how long I should wait? I don't have to do that on my ubuntu laptop. I don't have to do that on firefox in the example you handed to me. It's bad when I have to learn that. The computer should never make me wait unnecessarily, and I find it worrying that people are so readily accepting of it.