General rant about the state of desktop software nowadays [closed]
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1552055/general-rant-about-the-state-of-desktop-software-nowadaysUbuntu recently asked to update itself. I thought ok, there's a weekend coming up, if it breaks I'll have some time to fix it. Boy I was right... half way through the update process it gave an obscure "error". It was totally not clear if it broke the computer, or rolled back, or what I can expect during the next reboot. This was the last straw. I don't usually comment on public forums, but now I feel I have to find like-minded people, and start fixing the world.
Grievances
updates should never ever themselves become a risk. Like, I have to allocate certain times during the week, where I allow updates on phone or desktop, knowing that there's a 20% chance something will break. I can't have my devices breaking unexpectedly, and disrupt work, journey, financial transaction... you know general stuff where I rely on devices to function!
hiding scrollbars: what's up with that? scrollbars are great for positioning, tell where you are
thick window headers in Gnome: it's desktop, not a mobile device, i don't have to grab it with my salad fingers. Why do we need gigantic thick headers?
inactive and active window headers are indistinguishable: why is that a good thing? Active should be blue, inactive gray. Plain, simple, functional.
no borders around windows: place 4-5 black terminals partially covering each other. Good luck trying to grab the side of one. You can't tell where one stops and the next one starts. Borders existed for a reason.
no start menu: app tiles are not a substitute. Organizing stuff is a hierarchical problem, not a 2d tiling problem. App tiles are fine for a phone, not ok for desktop.
no taskbar: because why exactly? How do I see an overview of programs and quickly switch between them with a single click?
one app icon = one instance of the program : totally not true on desktop. Gnome's new panel, or whatever this is called nowadays, with those quicklaunch icons, and dots, signaling multiple instances... guys, that's exactly what the taskbar was solving!
large paddings and margins, tiny text in the middle: my monitor is gigantic compared to 20 years ago, but I find myself having to scroll because UI's nowadays can't view more than 7 items in the visible part of a list. Screen real-estate is wasted on paddings, swaths of empty space. It creates tunnel vision. Use those pixels wisely, don't waste them!
rounded corners: what's the obsession with That? You won't bump your toe into UI controls, there's no point making them round. There's nothing wrong with corners, they can be actually more compact.
no visual clues for what is a button, an input box, or just a passive label : look at a UI from 20 years ago, you could tell, just by looking at a passive picture, what is clickable, what is editable.
switching out UI controls below finger or mouse: you type in your password, then Teams pops up, grabs focus, the whole thing happens so quickly you resume typing your password into Teams... But same thing on Android: tap on the keyboard, then it pops the "do you want to install updates" popup right above the keyboard, under your typing fingers!
popups: app wants something, just pops it's notification, question, or whatever, right on top of everything you are doing. Gnome does it, windows does it, android does it... Like, no, solve it some other way!
clipboard not working properly : why not fix this, instead of "fixing" UI-s
Like, am I the only one who thinks the windows 95/xp/7 era got desktop UI-s right, and it's downhill ever since?
Why is Xfce4 Not the default window manager on Ubuntu? Isn't Linux supposed to designed by power users, for power users? Is the new Gnome really what power users want nowadays?
Am I the only one who finds modern UIs terrible? Why is no one doing anything about it? Should I? Why did bad design take over Linux too? Is Ubuntu not the distro I should be using? What's going on?
