- cross-posted to:
- programming@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- programming@programming.dev
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I also always find the minimalism vs. maximalism debate interesting for usability. Lots of minimal designs are so flat that you can’t tell a button from a label or icon.
At the same time, iOS’ new Frutiger theme regularly confuses me with its transparency, e.g. yesterday I saw that the silent-mode notification had a ➋ inside. It was centered and everything. Then the notification went away, but the ➋ stayed, because it was from an app icon behind.I wish, we could throw out the bad eye candy, like transparency, while keeping the good parts, like 3D buttons and such. I feel like this kind of neo-brutalist UI design isn’t the worst direction to go in:
(This particular example isn’t perfect, like the buttons are flat, while there’s useless shadows around the boxes. But yeah, could just move those shadows to the buttons and it would still look fine.)
Checkboxes that look like left/right toggle switches are the worst. And the only way to know whether left or right is on is colour?! Can you please get in the fucking sea?
Thank you! I do not understand this. One way is blue and the other way is green… I have had to go into another panel where I know how I set something before, and look how the check boxes are there in order to discern the correct way to use them.
Isn’t left=off and right=on?
I believe that, but… why should that be the case? It’s a convention without a reference or motivation. I remember when they were new and I really had nothing to refer to and just having no idea whether they were on or off. The fact that I’ve got used to them now isn’t really that forgivable. In contrast, checkboxes not only have convention behind them, but mimicked filling in paper forms which many people were and are familiar with anyway. The idea that “filled” is on and “empty” is off seems inherently more intuitive even if you’ve never filled in a form if you just know that the concept of forms that you fill in exists.
Of course, a checkbox is better.
Is that a mock up you made or something that exists?
Check this one out: https://store.kde.org/p/1985239
It’s a mockup I found on image search (from searching “neobrutalism GUI” or the like): https://www.magnific.com/premium-vector/hand-drawn-neo-brutalism-ui-elements-collection_186004756.htm
And yeah, that theme you linked is already pretty cool. Not terribly enamored with the retro aesthetic personally (especially with bad contrast like here), but if that can be done with KDE/Kvantum, then an actual neobrutalist theme, or just one with the papercuts fixed, is likely just as possible…
I actually love that design, it’s minimal without being corpo-slick. Is it just a mockup or is there some way to make all my computers look that way?
Well, this kind of design language is actually referred to as “neobrutalism”, so you might find a theme under this name. But from what I’ve seen so far, it’s mostly a thing in web design at this point…
It doesn’t feel like it was made with the idea of being anything more than a clean product that gets the job done
I mean, “clean product that gets the job done” is fine with me. Let people theme/customize and it’s win-win IMO.
Just think of how long it takes to craft a skeuomorphic icon compared to a symbolic monochrome one.
About the same time.
To be fair I’m not too fond of extremely colorful icons. They do have their place, but in most interfaces I do prefer flat or slightly shadowed icons.
I value more the UX of the interface than the design of the icons, tough the icons are indeed important. Painting icons over KDE does not really change how you interact with KDE.
I don’t particularly like KDE, but have not found a better DE anyway.
One good thing about minimalist GUIs is they’re much easier to optimize. Of course, you can still fuck it up, especially if your name is Microslop. Amazing how relatively demanging monochromatic rectangles with no animations can be.
You don’t have to optimize rounded corners, blur or fancy animations if you don’t code them in at all. Not necessarily the best approach, but at least there’s a positive. Everything can be messed up easily, but not everything can be done right easily.
you would think so, but somehow that never seems to be the case in practice. software has just been getting way more simplified visually while also getting way heavier with the likes of electron, GTK4, QML, etc.
for example, gnome-calculator uses nearly 300 MB of RAM on my system. that’s significantly more memory than my entire desktop environment (trinity). in the '00s everything was plastered with glossy skeuomorphic textures, 3D animations, transparency with blur, etc. and running all these different glossy programs together on one system still left you with a smaller memory footprint than gnome’s calculator.
we are fucked and our UIs don’t even get to be pretty anymore.
I think there’s one more big angle to modern design minimalism. It gets out of the way.
Every day, we are bombarded with millions of design elements. If they would all scream, show themselves, try to be special, many would get overwhelmed, overloaded, overburdened. The classic design screams individuality, impression, emotion. The minimalist one is there for the function without distraction, like a quiet servant - there when you need it, out of sight elsewhere. It’s a design philosophy of an age when everything is at your fingertips.
With that said, and with my strong preference to modern, minimalist designs, I appreciate the effort others put into making their computing experience truly reflect their workflow and intention.
overall i enjoy what you said, but …
“like a quiet servant - there when you need it, out of sight elsewhere”
this doesnt at all reflect my experience with oversimplified things like gnome or libadwaita. things specifically are not there when i need them. thats the whole problem.
edit - formatting
This is also exactly my problem with minimalist systems. That, and things being hardcoded in a way I don’t like and not having any reasonable recourse to change it.
I feel like the problem of GNOME is not minimalism - it’s lack of proper customization. It’s a minimal setup that works for GNOME devs, but not you.
Personally, I enjoy using Adwaita apps under KDE. Adwaita works great with the “one app - one purpose” philosophy, while KDE allows you to make global arrangements the way you like, so that everything you need is at your fingertips, and everything you don’t is out of the way. You can customize KDE to look in a way that compliments Adwaita, and it looks and works very well.
Thanks for posting @SocialistVibes01@lemmy.ml, that aeticle was more interesting & thought invoking than I thought it would be.
I’m using XFCE with a theme that feels like it’s from the 90’s and thinking about it, it does feel better to use than all the modern craziness that Microsoft has been doing in the last few years. I hated the Metro era…
I’m also using XFCE but with the Materia theme, because the visual noise of pseudo-3D overstimulates me and i like clean lines.
A dislike of minimalistic interfaces is not the only reason that I am using twenty-plus-year-old styling (older than Oxygen, even) on a DE of the same vintage, but it is one minor reason.
I am curious about what are your major reasons ?
The largest one is probably the lack of churn. I don’t have to relearn what things look like or how controls function every few years (or where settings have migrated to, or how to accomplish random-obscure-thing-I-might-need-to-do-once-a-year). It lets me get on with whatever I sat down at the computer to do in the first place, which was almost certainly not tinkering with the DE.
It’s also light on resources, since it dates to the days when a single core and 1GB RAM was considered a pretty decent system.
(Note that TDE, which is what I am using, is still well-maintained—it’s just that the people working on it consider keeping the original look and feel to be one of their goals.)
Minimalism in GUIs, maybe (still, give me CLI any day). But minimalism in housing and infrastructure is absolutely critical and they are absolutely not equal to software. We need to be as efficient as we can because I don’t know if the author has noticed the state of housing in the world. How many more “boring, dull” buildings could be built for the same price? How many more if we copy pasted the same designs instead of demanding everything be unique? (But god forbid they be too different from the existing style or else the NIMBYs protesting minimalist buildings complain about that too.) The people who “prefer” the visually complex building have never been homeless in the back alley of that building before, nor have they ever been priced out of their neighbourhood by gentrification when their boring gray building gets torn down to build the pretty building.
i understand where you’re going but that it’s because we’re fucked up by capital, but once you get past that… i don’t see china having a lack of beautiful architecture that blends modernity with traditional style and everything in between. sure, if the us decides to build housing for the people, do whatever you can to make that possible, but it’s not like we only need to do that.
Literally one of the first complaints libs have about Chinese cities is “copy paste skyscrapers everywhere.” They have some variety in parts of the city but most of the residential areas are still “boring” and “homogeneous” and “designed to kill individualism” according to Western internet geniuses.
Evidently they’ve never visited one of those suburban subdivisions in their own country where all of the houses are built to the same blueprint. Same effect, slightly different scale.
Also, Chinese cities don’t give a shit if you decorate the outside of your unit. HOAs do.
It’s time to bring back this stuff!
Was the compiz fusion cube minimalist or maximalist? I used to wow my non-linux friends with that thing.
UI’s peaked with the CLI. It’s all been downhill from there
