Having an interest in design, I often feel a vibe of aggression towards the whole endeavor coming from some elements of OSS scene that I can see being equally infuriating or hurtful as "neckbeards". Among them are:

- dismissal of design as a sort of thin veneer, somewhat fake, lipstick-on-good-bacon

- design as a kludge aimed at amateurs, to the point of preferring the worse UI (all else being equal) so as to prove something

- design = prettiness, and, by extensions, design being entirely a matter of taste and therefore impossible to criticize

- the complete rejection of any argument or evidence that cannot be derived from any of the laws of thermodynamics, Shannon, or at least an RFC

That being said, having browsed the elementary OS website, I'm not sure if isn't the victim of some of these errors itself. It sure seems to be a ripoff of macOS ca. 5 years ago applied as thin veneer to Linux. Their "brand" page may also be the first implementation of cargo-cult design.

Firstly, I see a lot of people complaining about the design, but the matter of fact is a lot more programmers are willing to work for free and make their contributions open source than designers are. This was more true a decade ago than it is now, so there is a lot of "if it works, do not break it" attitude.

Secondly, "good design" is subjective as opposed to a program that achieves its goals. No matter what you do, you will have a substantial amount of people hate your designs. So when people come in and tell them that the design sucks, there are a lot of people also telling them that it is good and it works.

What needs to happen is people come up with objective shortfalls in existing designs and let them know how that can be fixed.

Design may unfortunately be one of the human endeavors ill-suited for the bazaar, while programming happens to occupy the completely opposite end of the spectrum.

An API is almost as binding as a law of nature. People will grumble, and maybe write adaptors, pile on abstractions, possibly even send you pull requests. But to change an API against the owners' will requires a bold and binary decision to fork with all it entails.

It also doesn't matter. There's only one limitation programmers are often exposed to: that of the choice of language/framework/platform... And witness how much flack a perfectly innocent language* like JS gets.

Within their implementation, programmers have free reign (within reason, don't get your hopes up, tab-indenting freaks)

For design, it starts out with a somewhat arbitrary definition of what is meant by a "style guide". Methods to validate implementations are tacked-on (if existing). A fully-formed style guide (...doesn't exist, but...) would reduce those implementing it to mere tools, while any style guide that allows creativity will inevitably lead to design-by-committee-that-never-meets. At a company, this tension is resolved by iteration, team-work and constant communication, allowing people to form a group identity. But that requires some sort of authority, a hiring/education process that creates a group with some basic, shared understanding/ideology/vocabulary and lots of FaceTime.

*applying the insanity defense

>a lot more programmers are willing to work for free and make their contributions open source than designers are

As a front-end web-dev with a passion for Design/UI/UX I can tell you that many designers just don't know how to contribute and a large portion don't know that contributing to a project as large as an OS is even something you can do.

Programming has a history of collaboration going way back, and because of things like Git/package managers etc, this sharing economy is presented very early on and it sticks on the programmers mind. The designers equivalent is stuff like free stock-photo websites and icon packs, their sharing economy lacks comparable concepts.

edit: formatting

It doesn't happen that projects like GNOME and KDE get bashed by trying to improve the whole stack experience, by developers which only care to scatter xterms across their screens.

This is why many of us that enjoy UI design ended up going to platforms where it is praised.

GNOME development has been mostly design driven since maybe 2008, the whole 3 era had professional designers on board since the beginning.

I know, and how much FOSS bashing have they received for their ideas?

Definitely too much, mostly by a vocal minority of the userbase. I guess design is not enough, you need good charismatic leaders to be able to sell it to the community, and you need to be strong enough to not care about the criticism.

That said, not all design is made equal, sometimes a little dose of reality check from the community can be helpful.

They got bashed for removal of options (that could be hidden from average user), also they changed a lot of things and more or less reimplemented things that they didn't want to do at the beginning (and where bashed for lack of), so I'd say they made a lot of mistakes - for me gnome is usable without heavy tweaking since last year.

Which means it took 4 years to get it to usable state where i don't have to download tons of plugins to make it effective environment for work and multitasking.

They only get bashed if you hang around /r/linux. That place is toxic sometimes.

The open source movement is a programmer thing to begin with. "Source" does stand for "source code" after all, so it's no surprise that designers don't contribute as much as programmers.

Designers do their own part by putting out the design equivalent of free open source code, in other words free icons, fonts, templates, concepts, etc.

My only problem with the design is the lack of maximize minimize and close buttons in the windows. I could care less if it looks like Mac or Windows or whatever I just need to have those three buttons otherwise I'll just use my phone if I want some "revolutionary different way of interacting with things" (tm).

It's not revolutionary and yes the design of elementary is highly opinionated. I personally got used to it quickly and understand why they removed it

I don't really care why they removed them. I just don't want to jump through hoops just to use yet another desktop OS.

it's quite easy to enable them (need to use dconf iirc)

Designers work on projects for free a lot same as programmers. Its just not opensource software. Its impossible to contribute when there are 15 devs wanting the ui work their way bacause its their passion project. As designer work like that slowly stops being passion project because you do stuff and only the things dev agree on get made. Design is about overall vision and big picture. You cant glue some pretty parts and expect it to work. Thats beauty of programming, you can totaly do that. In fact its best practice to do that.

The only well designed open-source projects are usualy from people who are designers who can code. Or led by company hiring designers.

Most of the open source software manages to ask for logo and thats it. Logos are hardly passion, in fact its boring and its not design.

I looked recently into elementaryOS in my quest for a good looking and functional linux distro, as it has been touted for being a good looking distro. It has too many UI problems to my liking. Look at this picture from the OP: http://taoofmac.com/media/AvRn9_F_JHGrGsCSlJwydak6BTc=/blog/... [edit: the one with caption "Zooming in on a NASA image I had handy"].

- There is a lack of contrast for the text in the left bar.

- The icons in the bottom bar are off: the colors are dull too (too low saturation is a common theme in elementaryOS).

- The size of the icons in the bottom bar is also off. They are way to big if you compare them to the main navigation (left bar). The visual hierarchy is not ok.

If you ask me: the best looking linux distro atm is manjaro kde.

screenshot link errors out (owner of website doesn't allow hotlinking to that resource)

Highlight the address bar and press enter. It will request again without the referral from HN.

Thx, I edited my comment.

I think the problem is that Linux and its ecosystem follow a bazaar model. In this setting coordination is harder, which is critical for a nicely designed UI.

That said, my favorite UI design was mid-to-late 2000s GNOME, as implemented by Ubuntu 6.09 Edgy Eft. It was simple, and everything just worked. Sadly, Ubuntu has become a bit more complex and buggy these days.

I think that, if I want to get the best of Linux as a developer, running a text-based keyboard-driven environment (mutt, emacs...) on a tiling manager is the best route to happiness.

For what it's worth Ubuntu-Mate is keeping that particular fire burning: https://ubuntu-mate.org/

It's a refinement of the old MacOS though. I agree it's very similar, but even as a designer I feel like you don't have the reinvent the wheel, and that MacOS did find a lot of saner solutions to most problems on desktop. There are innovations in it and stuff cribbed from Windows as well.

> dismissal of design as a sort of thin veneer, somewhat fake, lipstick-on-good-bacon

Part of the problem is that people confuse good design with pretty design (on both sides). The purpose of design is not to improve aesthetics but to improve usability. Aesthetics is an important component of usability, to be sure, but it is not the primary goal.

The difficulty is that power-user control/discoverability/aesthetics ends up being a pick-two triangle. And most designs pushing aesthetics also push discoverability, and power users feel shafted with an overly simplistic tool that isn't as productive as their tool which emphasizes control but totally lacks in discoverability and maybe leaves aesthetics to plug-in themes.

Good design tries to maximize all three.

Others may see see a vibe of aggression toward the whole OSS scene coming from people who hold that they have an interest in design.

I'm not aware of any slurs against designers that are equivalent to the slur against OSS developers as "neckbeards."

Hipster would probably be an equivalent.

> design as a kludge aimed at amateurs, to the point of preferring the worse UI (all else being equal) so as to prove something.

Ugh, I know exactly what you mean. It's maddening to see stereotypically uncultured nerds celebrate ugly UIs and clumsy CLI apps. It's so ridiculous.

This might just be /g/ but I always get a lot of flak for running Gnome 3, other users like to point out how much screen real estate it wastes with padding, however that's the main reason I'm using it.

I'm sick to death of XFCE and KDE setups with poor proportions and crazy alignment issues, I don't want an interface that is spatially hyper-compact, I want one that looks pleasant.

I mean Christ, you can't even vertically align elements in XFCE Panels, the whole thing has an aversion to aesthetics.

yeah, i got used to gnome3 during a redhat class, and subsequently on a default kali install for its own particular purpose, and i don't mind it at all. the alignment is good, and when you want to get rid of all the border stuff you can just full screen.

for example, my firefox looks like something out of windows 95, but if i want to pretend i'm using i3, f11 -> fullscreen, ctrl+tab and i'm set. and if i want to see a bookmark toolbar, url bar, tabs, a title bar, and a menu, i can. why not?

and yeah, the real goodness (which is not unique to gnome3) is the snap alignment stuff and ease of using virtual desktops and setting keyboard shortcuts. gnome3 could be a lot worse than it is. (edit: for me, everything gnome3 does, kde does better, but gnome3 "just works" a lot better than kde and, to some degree, unity. i'd rather be using i3 generally, but that can be more effort to maintain than its worth in certain situations)

I find window snapping pretty essential, using a Mac without better touch tool is truly painful.

For my taste, Gnome 3 only needs a few small tweaks, dash to dock, dropdown terminal, and jetisoning adwaita out of the nearest airlock.

http://i.imgur.com/jo7XbHl.png

I see greener grass in a parallel universe where the best Apple designers got together and created a really, really good tiling window manager — available as an addition to what we already have. I feel that whoever chose the Miller columns view in Finder, or whoever came up with the persistent global menu bar, these guys should be giving us an amazing tiling wm.

Lovely screenshot. Mind sharing that wallpaper?

Sure http://i.cubeupload.com/QgvinA.png

You say you would rather be using i3 generally, yet you also say that you can pretend by using fullscreen on a window.

Do you not use the tiling? Do you simply use it for greater screen real-estate?

I'm curious as my preference of i3 focuses on the tiling

No I totally use it for tiling as well; I just meant that the "too much chrome" complaint about gnome3 can be overcome.

And while not as good as real tiling, keyboard shortcuts to the various snapped positions go a long way for the couple minutes of effort they require to configure in the settings UI.

Edit: e.g. super+arrow keys for various areas, or add in shift. Not a lot of planning required.

not to mention that i've yet to have as bug-free an experience on elementary as i have on vanilla ubuntu, or opensuse with kde, or a really basic arch + i3 install, or kali with gnome 3, or (the list goes on).

the unearned appreciation of elementary has always baffled me. i mean, the developers are not hacks or anything. i quite liked geary, and i'm fine with distros multiplying (why not? just use what you want, it doesn't matter). but elementary is barely any more mac-ish than ubuntu with unity, and it's always felt like the beta version of someone's side project.

to sum up, i'm happy that they have interest in their project, and i respect the effort they put into it. however, most of the praise for elementary seems to come from and for the wrong places; it's not particularly polished or user friendly (they have a history of "i'll choose for you," but not in as an intuitive way as Apple), its thematically unified design does not last unless you either use a vanilla install forever or put in just as much linux-y work in maintaining your install as you would w/ arch or debian or ubuntu (and you cared about how everything looks).

to me, elementary is a nice little niche distro like bodhi linux. it's bizarre to me that people can use it as a main system unless they're very advanced (read: they play with config files like a sysadmin and code decently in at least bash), and it's outright unthinkable that people use it for anything beyond checking email if they're keeping a vanilla install. this stuff keeps the ecosystem healthy, but the articles and comments i read about it look like they're coming from people who simply don't use linux that much (and aren't aware that all the good things they see in elementary are done better in other distros).

I used elementary myself for about half a year as my main system and have a bit of a split opinion on it myself. On the one hand, I did find the design to be very appealing - and contrary to what you claim, I haven't seen as nice a design anywhere else in the Linux world. (I may not be an old hand yet, but I've come around a bit.) I love how the whole desktop just works together to produce a very satisfying visual experience, and some of their homegrown apps are really sweet (specifically the text editor Scratch, but also the file browser).

However, I can also confirm what you say about bugs - a vanilla Ubuntu LTS is quite a bit more stable than eOS is. Having said that, most of the bugs I encountered on eOS were either avoidable (by switching the browser to Firefox, for example) or I could live with them. The one I found most annoying was a bug in the music app that didn't let me save songs to a playlist. I did actually dig into the source code for that one, but eventually gave it up and went back to trusty old (terminal!) mocp.

All in all, I enjoyed using eOS, but when the time came for me to buy a new laptop, I decided to go back to Ubuntu. ElementaryOS is a great project that deserves more attention (and more programmers working on it), but unfortunately does still feel too much like a perpetual beta. I'll keep my eyes on it, hopefully some day I'll go back, but not just yet.

> the articles and comments i read about it look like they're coming from people who simply don't use linux that much (and aren't aware that all the good things they see in elementary are done better in other distros).

This was simply a "surface" observation of mine too, until I've first hand met people who were impressed with it, and haven't actually used used Linux, but merely used it occasionally.

Is there a difference between "graybeards" and "neckbeards"? I think culturally there is a difference and he possibly meant to use greybeard here.

Yes. "Neckbeard" has connotations of sexism and other ugliness. "Graybeard" merely connotes old age and anachronism.

I would add experience, wisdom, and stubbornness to that list, personally.

Those traits tend to tag along with old age, at least as a stereotype.

At least in programming contexts, it also carries a connotation of competence.