I am surprised that this is the current state of UI, holy shit. Does any techie care about their UI or “good enough” is where the care ends? You couldn’t pay me to look at that all day.

Making a good UI requires that you have some sort of central list of guiding UI principles, and the wherewithal and authority to enforce it.

That means you need a team to:

- Come up with a detailed set of UI principles and guidelines

- Test that they're sane

- Enforce them across the entire system

Steps one and two require user interface experts, who're probably already getting paid good money to do principle UI design at Apple or Microsoft.

Open source without a backing company will have a particularly hard time with step three, because these projects tend to be communal and at least a little fragmented/disjoint by nature.

Mainly you just need money.

I'm inclined to agree. The design is fine, functionally, but there's a certain harmony missing from it and most Linux desktops (even elementaryOS') that makes them feel like using toys rather than proper desktops.

Mind you, I say that as a macOS user (although I did run Linux full-time for a good six years in a past life), and I'm sure many a Linux user will call the macOS interface toy-like to their eyes.

Even though all I see, whether in the old screenshots are the current, are misaligned and seemingly randomly-sized icons, ugly text rendering, and an unclear design vision, I'll still say that the typical defaults still do a pretty good job considering that no Linux distro with mass appeal has yet shipped with a forced theme to make everything just right because, after all, such a distro would never gain mass appeal to start with.

Not with the Linux users who know they're running Linux, at least. I think this is what Ubuntu and elementaryOS are trying to establish: Linuxes for people who don't know what Linux is. That gives some freedom for forcing good, consistent design — but not until there's enough "first party" software to make the rest of the Linux application ecosystem irrelevant.

I don't think that'll happen until Ubuntu or elementaryOS bring about killer apps, something like iLife for Linux. Beautiful, works exceedingly well, and designed for ordinary people rather than fellow developers. A reason to develop for that one distro rather than the whole Linux ecosystem, so far not yet forthcoming.

> makes them feel like using toys rather than proper desktops.

Fascinating. I consider systems like Android, Windoze and MacOS to be like toys for the same reason: superficially beautiful, but not actually a good tool for work.

The problem with MacOS is that much of its refinements for power users are so different from Windows (and Linux desktops modeled after it), that people don't expect they can do things the easy way.

Suppose you have a document open. You want to attach it to an email you started writing. In MacOS, you drag the icon from the window's title bar into the email. That's it. No need to browse to the same thing you already have on the screen, because your desktop is a set of objects you interact with... Not a window manager.

If you want to open a file browser, you can right click the title bar on any document, and it will give you a breadcrumb of all the parent directories.

If you move a document you have open in an application, the application will notice, and save further changes to that new location too when you go back to it and press cmd-S.

These are just a few little things in one aspect of the OS. But macOS is full of them. Like consistent keyboard shortcuts.

Or multi touch gestures that act while you perform them, not just trigger an action after. There is a commitment to making the computer work like it should, instead of making the human adapt.

Meanwhile in Windows land, even the official apps can't figure out how they want to look or how they want to work. And this is what Linux desktops based themselves on.

There are of course signs that Apple has also lost its magic, and that a new generation raised on touch and web and cloud has no idea how this stuff works. The idea that you can e.g. scroll casually through a decade worth of emails with one flick, offline, is a pipe dream in Gmail land. It boggles my mind that basic conveniences like sortable, resizable and customizable tables are now a luxury in many apps.

But there still is an insane amount of design thought that went into macOS, and everyone else is years behind. That's just a fact.

I don't understand how people can't tell the difference between the fake smooth scroll FF has by default and a proper pixel smooth scroll you get with MOZ_USE_XINPUT2=1. The fake one scrolls line by line and smooths the transition, but still won't react to minor finger movements, there is a threshold and it feels fake as f*. Don't know why it's default on linux, but hey linux folk probably don't have high expectations anyway; they are probably fighting to keep it that way.

This is news to me! It feels good when reading a page but stops inertia working, I can't do a quick flick to jump to the top/bottom of a page with it enabled. Toggling the Firefox option for smooth scrolling doesn't help.

You touch on the real tragedy: that all this may be lost in favor of less well thought out interfaces.

I've been looking for blog posts and content about macOS UX design and testing. Because it really is stellar. I'm curious what kind of stuff the elementaryOS team is reading that informs their design choices. Any ideas where to look?

Bit late replying, but I think the WWDC videos, especially old ones, relating to user interface design, what's new in Cocoa (not Cocoa Touch), and accessibility are great places to see macOS' interface decisions explained and justified.

ah thanks! Yeah these are super interesting

Trouble is, at the end of the day nothing is more powerful or more efficient than the command line and once you've accepted that fact (which more and more people are there days) you might as well just use Linux.

Why choose between CLI and GUI if you can have both? I have a shell on my osx and use it for a large majority of my work, but I also have decent CLI <-> GUI interaction (pbcopy, mdfind, screencapture, open, osascript, ...), and the most consistent, easy to use but yet powerful GUI.

And two things OSX is absolutely unmatched in: spotlight and preview.

Millions would disagree with you.

So ... like Gnome then? It hides all the "advanced" settings so well that you can't actually change them without resorting to the command-line.

This is a bad take

Of course it's a bad take, just another in a long line of people who think their own personal workflow is the only one anybody would ever need.

Even if the poster was kidding, it's symptomatic of the Linux ecosystem — never strive for better, what we've had for years is just fine, and be sure to mockingly put down any idea that dares to lift things up.

I just tried installing fedora with only a keyboard. The tab orders are nonsensical and the active item effect is just about imperceptible.

Better than last year I tried it where I couldn't even get past the timezone selection.

Please define "make all the difference".

"it makes a difference" or "it matters"

I think you are quibbling about things that 99.9% of people quite frankly don't care about. A substantial group will leave everything default and for most of the rest the fact that you can change the colorscheme/style/background is sufficient.

It's somewhat like a wine aficionado discussing the 7 delicate flavors that or an audiophile considering the virtue of using a slightly more expensive cable.

So when I ask how it makes a difference I wasn't looking for a trivial redefinition of the word I was asking rather what difference it makes. Do you believe more people will use it if its pretty? Do you believe more people will enjoy using it if its pretty? To what degree and why?

99.9% of people are perfectly fine with doors with a pull handle and a sign saying "PUSH" on them.

Software is full of pull handles with push on them but none of the described examples seem at all similar.

I think it's more that you are trying to see these things while other people use computers to do work.

So everyone with an eye for design doesn't do work?

Anyways anyone that has trained their eyes (which allows extremely technical visual skills to be developed, not just "art") to actually see what their eye is transmitting to them and not just interpreting it will immediately notice these kinds of things. It's like saying to them stop looking at letters if you're trying to read.

If this sounds like gibberish try this exercise. https://www.allaboutdrawings.com/upside-down-drawing.html

I'm a trained musician but I'm not going to complain when my plumber doesn't quite sing in tune. It just doesn't matter. I have a pretty well-trained eye for typography too, but when the choice is between systems that are free, fast, privacy-respecting, and functional and systems that are pretty but completely out of my control I'm never going to choose the latter.

I'm not sure what posts like yours are trying to achieve. Are you just complaining about how nobody has managed to make something that is free and perfectly well "designed"? If so, why not try to do something about it rather than complain? You'd probably make a lot of people happy if you did. To me it seems more like you are saying that your priorities are with superficial design rather than anything actually relating to work, hence my original comment.

i agree with you about the plumber. it doesn't matter. but imo that example is not really an analogous situation. what if your instrument was always out of tune? or if a member of your ensemble couldn't keep time? i bet that would prevent you from making a record or being productive otherwise as a musician.

as a full time developer and someone who does notice these little things, i care a lot about good design and visual polish. in order to get my work done, i have to use these interfaces for hours on end, after all. if it doesn't particularly bother you, hey that's great. even if not intentional, this and your original comment come off as a bit disparaging, so that reply isn't terribly off base.

Linux desktop is more like an unpolished trumpet, with a few dents. After a small amount of tuning, it plays the perfect note every time. You can take it apart, and adjust the internals. If you wish, you can turn it into any other type of instrument.

Then you have macOS, perfectly round, so shiny you can see your face, including the insides... the nicest looking trumpet money can buy. But it comes in one piece, only the shop can re-tune it, and has only one button, and sounds exactly the same as the other apple trumpets.

And Windows... average looking a trumpet, which everyone recognises, operated like a kazoo. Sometimes it plays the wrong note, or stop during a performance. You can retune it, but it will de-tune itself randomly. Sometimes it will recommend the shop's other instruments, and report back to the shop what you've been playing. But the shop now wants to rent studios, instead.

These analogies are fun. Reminded me of that Neal Stephenson book, "In the beginning was the command line".