As someone who born in the smartphone era, I don't found it ugly but a major design improvement.
Maybe the author should embrace the latest trends in UI design, instead of insisting the old way.
The end of the nice GTK button
161–170 of 666 posts
Re: The end of the nice GTK button
#162It 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.
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 4's Oxygen, though it's not very far into implementation yet.
Re: The end of the nice GTK button
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been hoping that for 20 years but it hasn't happened yet. It seemed like American companies always favoured GTK/GNOME (I guess because Qt/KDE development was more European?), even though Qt/KDE generally managed to do more with less. But I can appreciate that if you're aiming for the corporate market, customizability may be a downside.
I think that Red Hat (now part of freaking IBM ) has always been oriented to big corporations, knows how to speak their language, and is an obvious choice for corporate Linux support. If you're already in bed with RH on the server front, it makes obvious business sense to also follow them on the (much, much smaller) desktop front. Since RH basically owns Gnome development (I know, I know), they impressvely used it as…
Which is insane because even back in KDE 3.5 days, and Trinity following that, the support for complex user environments, security features, using any type of remote storage natively through the KIO subsystem, really good support for LDAP and AD and other things... it seemed like a natural fit for a more complex corporate environment. Especially tools like Konqueror and Kmail, both of which to me follow a natural progression out of the windows of the late 90's era, had really good usability and made sense fairly quickly to windows users.
Re: The end of the nice GTK button
#164--- Now one of the worst parts is that everywhere I only even hint at not completely loving the new libadwaita theme I instantly get shut down and disagreed with before I can even get the chance to give some feedback. Apparently not liking flat themes makes me a madman in this world. Why am I not allowed to even have opinions about the look of the operating system I'm using? --- But to be honest, isn't it one of the…
It's kind of cathartic watching this happen to a new generation of developers. They can't say I didn't warn them! Ultimately I think this will be quite good for QT/kde in the long term. Gnome/GTK gets a lot of corporate support, especially from red hat, but seeing the issues pop OS had with GTK makes me hopeful that more companies will adopt QT.
Dropbox desktop app is written in QT, at least on Windows and Linux. Mac uses its own custom UI to better fit with the Mac-app world.
Re: The end of the nice GTK button
#165I keep wondering how long it will take for putting borders and edges or some graphical hint around functional UI elements (whether 3d or not) to come back into style. It's such a clear example of form over function to remove these (and if you ask me it doesn't even look good anyway, but let's put aesthetics aside).
I would love to hear from any actual UX professional who wants to try to defend that making functional elements look identical to non-functional ones is a good idea. I would be fascinated to hear what the argument in its favor could possibly be.
Re: The end of the nice GTK button
#166Can I also mourn the loss of title bars as I carefully hunt for a spot to grab a window to move it?
For what it's worth, I recently discovered that I can move windows on GNOME by holding down the Windows/super key and dragging. It's a small thing but it's actually quite nice.
What's also good, is windows/super key and dragging right mouse button -> resize window.
I don't remember if that's enabled by default, or you have to install some gnome tweaks to do it, but it is nice.
Re: The end of the nice GTK button
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been hoping that for 20 years but it hasn't happened yet. It seemed like American companies always favoured GTK/GNOME (I guess because Qt/KDE development was more European?), even though Qt/KDE generally managed to do more with less. But I can appreciate that if you're aiming for the corporate market, customizability may be a downside.
I think that Red Hat (now part of freaking IBM ) has always been oriented to big corporations, knows how to speak their language, and is an obvious choice for corporate Linux support. If you're already in bed with RH on the server front, it makes obvious business sense to also follow them on the (much, much smaller) desktop front. Since RH basically owns Gnome development (I know, I know), they impressvely used it as…
Yeah. SUSE (at one point owned by Novell) was kind of trying to go the same route, but never really got as big as RH. (Though again I wonder how much of that was just an America/Europe split)
Re: The end of the nice GTK button
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> good design requires top down authority to force a consistent look
which hear me out here... was the whole point of having a standardized widget set and UI library.
Re: The end of the nice GTK button
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's also an accessibility setting (under the "Display" section) for "Show toolbar button shapes".
>> There's also an accessibility setting (under the "Display" section) for "Show toolbar button shapes". Fascinating. Sounds like if you can't read the mind of the desinger you must have a disability. What a great attitude :-p
1. Accommodating disabled people is in no way an insult.
2. Being disabled is a normal fact of life, also not an insult.
3. Accessibility affordances are not only for disabled people. Lots of people who wouldn’t identify as disabled routinely and gladly use a wide variety of accessibility features.
4. Having difficulty identifying actionable elements like buttons isn’t about reading anyone’s mind, and it isn’t a universal difficulty regardless of their presentation. The ability to customize it so it’s easier for you is inherently an accessibility affordance.
5. It’s entirely possible this setting (along with several others under accessibility) may be more helpful when needed if they were available in another location, but it’s also possible that would make the experience more confusing, and quite possibly for more people—especially for disabled people.
6. People may benefit from this information—quite a few here based on other comments—and it doesn’t deserve this kind of negativity.
7. With all of that in mind, while I’m keeping this response direct, I took the last point as a prompt to edit some of my own negativity out of it. I had a strong negative reaction both because I think accessibility is a universal good and because I appreciate accessibility affordances which help me. But that’s not a reason for me to be a jerk either.
Re: The end of the nice GTK button
#170What is the reason for everything having flat UIs now?
basically fashion. e.g. if you asked people to describe this app http://ptkdb.sourceforge.net/demo.html i'm sure a lot of them would use the word "dated", but the actual widgets are pretty similar to what we're using today, and layout hasn't changed much either. it's just the theming fashions that keep changing so radically.