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

The Decline of Usability

datagubbe.se

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

691–700 of 719 posts

Re: The Decline of Usability

#691

Post by brabel »

necovek wrote: post #673
brabel wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ubuntu 19 is terrible. I was forced to use KDE (Plasma) instead because they broke so many basic UI concepts (to give you a tiny taste: changing tabs went from Ctrl+Tab to Meta+Tab, the keyboard layout switcher takes 2 seconds or more because it pops up a stupid little window to show the language selected, and many other things just like this I thankfully erased from my mind and now only the frustration remains).

I use the keyboard layout switcher only with the keyboard which is pretty much instant, so I wonder how was it broken in any of the Ubuntu 19.x releases — that sounds worrying if it carries over to 20.04? (I am on 18.04) "Any Ubuntu 19.x" because non-LTS Ubuntu releases come out every six months, so there was Ubuntu 19.04 and Ubuntu 19.10, but never an "Ubuntu 19": they are never as polished or as stable as LTS relea…

The language switcher was broken in 18 already : https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-shell/+bug/1...

People who switch between several languages just can't use Ubuntu because of this, read some testimonials on the bug linked above.

This is just one of the pain points though. There were many.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#692

Post by coribuci »

Animats wrote: post #10

Ubuntu got worse at 18.04. Logging in on desktop now requires "swiping up" with the mouse to get the password box. The "swiping" thing is to avoid problems with unwanted activation when the device is in your pocket. It's totally inappropriate to desktops. Then there's icon mania. I've recently converted from Blender 2.79 to Blender 2.82. Lots of new icons. They dim, they change color, they disappear as modes change,…

> (I have no idea what's happening in Windows 10 land. I have one remaining Windows machine, running Windows 7.)

I use a laptop with an external monitor. When the monitor is not connected, Adobe Reader windows have the title bar out of the screen. The only way to maximize: Alt + space + x.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#693

Post by coribuci »

rleigh wrote: post #622
buckminster wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just the logon screen. In many apps if you type CTRL+O followed by a file name to bring up the File Open dialog and populate the name field then the application frequently loses the first few characters of the file name. Or type CTRL+T followed by text. This opens a new tab but the text appears in the old tab if you don't pause. These things used to work reliably. I think most of the problems are caused by i…

Application developers have ceased to care about input focus for keyboard entry. Here's an example I encounter whenever I use Microsoft Teams at work. I go to "Add Contact", and the entire screen becomes a modal entry box into which I have to enter a name. There's a single entry field on the screen. It's not in focus, even though that's the sole action that I can perform at this time. I have to explicitly select the…

It is the same on chrome or firefox. Empty window only with url bar. You need to type in the url bar to write something. Writing software is hard. Using your brain while writing software is even harder.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#694

Post by coribuci »

jodrellblank wrote: post #658
p1necone wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows hello is such a nice experience (at least just for local login), but I will never use it because I don't trust Microsoft with my data.

"the info that identifies your face, iris, or fingerprint never leaves your device." - https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4468253/windows-10-...

> "the info that identifies your face, iris, or fingerprint never leaves your device." - https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4468253/windows-10-....

Of course not.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#695

Post by toohotatopic »

majewsky wrote: post #677
toohotatopic wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. I forgot to mention that the problem comes with X11 and the clipboard. The first selection doesn't and shouldn't copy to the clipboard because entering a new address would focus the bar and replace the existing clipboard. It wouldn't be possible to copy any selection into the address bar. So to use an url from the address bar requires selecting and re-selecting the entire address. That second selecting has bec…

You want right-click > "Paste & go".

Actually the other way round: how to get an url out of the address bar. It used to be that a double click was enough since the X Window system copies selections automatically to the clipboard.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#696

Post by coribuci »

lmm wrote: post #311
hiram112 wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GIMP has had no much powerful functionality while at the same time having an absolute awful UI going on 15 years or more now. And it still hasn't been fixed. I'm not a big believer in conspiracies, but if there's one I'd not dismiss out of hand, it's that Adobe or some other company has been ensuring that GIMP has never been improved or become a viable replacement for some PS users. There is obviously a large potenti…

Good designers don't work for free. It's kind of strange that programmers have a culture of working for free (or at least of employers agreeing to open-source contributions), but we do, so gnarly algorithms get open-sourced all the time.

> Good designers don't work for free.

Is there any company employing them ? Because i find the user interfaces from the 80-90 even 00 much more usable that the today's crap. Remember help buton ? Remember buttons ? Why does windows 10 looks the same and behaves worse than windows 1.0 ?

Re: The Decline of Usability

#697

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

userbinator wrote: post #429
anthk wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95

Every time I see a screenshot of someone theming Linux to look like Windows, the most obvious thing that stands out as not being quite right is the font rendering. Even when using Microsoft's own TTFs, the font renderers that Linux use seem to put the pixels in a slightly different place than the MS one. Other differences I could see from the screenshots: the comboboxes have the dropdown arrow next to instead of insi…

This is for XFCE, which has one of the simplest tools for setting the font rendering right, with instant visual feedback. At least when i used it. Even in multimonitor setups with different resolutions/orientations.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#698

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

wbl wrote: post #228
EEMac wrote: post #222

Part of this is because the sensors are winning. Sensors (about 70% of the population) use an application by mapping: a click here does this . Based on literature and my experience with my husband, maps are made separately for each application no matter what the similarities are. Most computer programmers are intuitives: we want things to work the same way in one application as they work in another. That makes it eas…

Please explain dd then.

Datenduplikator, data duplicate, duplicate data, dump data, data dump?

Re: The Decline of Usability

#699

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

chacha2 wrote: post #122
Kaibeezy wrote: post #74

I finally switched from Win7 to 10 about a month ago. Couldn’t put it off any longer once lockdown started. I’m tech management, so it’s office, mail, browser and graphics mainly. Illustrator 4 runs fine on an X220. Win10. I just absolutely hate it. Every day I have to relearn something obvious. I can’t find the corners of windows to grab them, and when I do, it’s one damn pixel wide and I get jitters. Why is Candy C…

https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu There you go. Brings back the Windows 7 Start menu/

Nay, i'd rather https://cairoshell.com/
Post reply on HN