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nosioptar | on: Show HN: GentleOS – A pair of hobby OSes for vintage 32-bit and 16-bit PCs
That video's bullshit. People prefer old UIs because modern ui is shit, not because they're not creative.

Computer programs are tools. It doesnt do anyone any good if they're unusable in the name of chasing moronic trends.

reconnecting | parent | next
I have a theory that corporations make new UIs to entertain people through them. First, to create the feeling that something is happening, and second, to increase screen time.

Old interfaces were far more practical for getting work done, and therefore obviously boring.

For me, as someone who is supposed to use technology as a tool and not as a source of amusement, the new interfaces of the major OSes feel unacceptable. But the other billion people chatting and scrolling are the real consumers, not me — and as a result, we now have the interfaces we have.

latexr | root | parent | next
That’s one reason corporations make new UIs, yes, but the other is users demanding them for the sake of novelty. Reddit (but not only) is filled with people with no design sense complaining about how something which works (because it was relentlessly iterated on) looks “stale” and “old”. They’re the same users who jump from app to app willy nilly just chasing novelty. Any turd, if hyped enough, is ailed as “the future”, “modern”, “innovative”, which is repeated drivel from what the corporations tell you when they introduce their next thing.
alterom | root | parent
Not really a theory.

Software makers treat UIs the way auto makers treat paint and body styling.

luciferin | parent | next
I think there's a couple of different forces at play in the convergence of GUI design that we're seeing in the past 20 years. First, there's been a huge amount of widely accepted research that shows what the most accessible way to design an interface is. Things like Google's Material Design and Apples Human Interface Guidelines come to mind. Second, the widespread availability of those two specific design guides make it increasingly common for developers to just create to those. It ensures that things just work and are increasingly portable. Third, we're in a landscape where API stability and design is prized. That's partially because of the number of times that design has been broken by updates and version changes. It takes many years for developers to update their applications when a new back-end is developed, and the time in between gives broken applications, and ugly looking fallback. You can look at running GTK1 apps on modern GNOME, or X11 apps rendering on Wayland over the past decade for an example of this.

All that said, I truly miss the days when we had interface skinning. There was a skin for OS X called UNO that was absolute perfection in my eyes, and it was ported to an old version of Android back when skinning was a thing. There's nothing like it available now. Even GNOME is highly against theming and skinning now, apparently because they like breaking with every single release rather than maintaining an API/ABI and skinning support. The themes that were available for Windows XP were so much fun, even if you had to swap out DLLs to get them working.

zozbot234 | root | parent | next
> First, there's been a huge amount of widely accepted research that shows what the most accessible way to design an interface is.

Focus-group based and UX research was a lot more intense in the 1990s compared to today, and late 1990s UIs are still among the best available.

nosioptar | root | parent
Google's Material Design is fucking awful from an accessibility standpoint. There's no contrast. Clickable items don't look clickable. With a keyboard/remote, you can never tell what's selected.

Material is what made me hate google. It makes everything so difficult. It doesnt even look good. It's a low contrast sea of modern bullshit.

I sincerely hope that the material designers go to hell when they die and are forced to use their own garbage designs for all eternity while those of us who dont suck can use properly designed software.

mftb | parent | next
I generally agree with you about UIs (if by shit you mean they've thrown away a ton of utility), but I don't think his video was bs, maybe just moved too far from it's original context.
LastTrain | parent
Like almost all bullshit that is believable by a multitude, it is couched in some very small truths.