[0] is the example that always comes to mind. I guess this made sense to somebody at the time, but it adds overhead to a process that was simple before, and isn't enabled just for "Enterprise" deployments, it's just dumped on the user to figure out how to configure screensaver hack settings by creating / modifying a theme.

[0] https://wiki.gnome.org/Attic/GnomeScreensaver/FrequentlyAske...

Instead of spending the substantial donations they received[1] on who knows what, the GNOME foundation should have spent some of it conducting proper focus groups.

1: https://www.gnome.org/news/2018/05/anonymous-donor-pledges-1...

I think it's an interesting and worthwhile experimental path; I just wish it wasn't the "default" as much as it is. But I also feel that way about Ubuntu. And Windows. xD

One of my least favourite was when it was not possible to configure the screensaver timeout to never turn off the display. IIRC you had a choice of several fixed times, from 5 minutes to 4 hours, but no "Never" option.

Not useful for systems which display information and are infrequently interacted with. That use case was completely ignored, and for no good reason.

oh no doubt, I have another comment from 4+ years ago about the same topic https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10883631 and even then it was ancient history IIRC

man, just looking at that page again reminded me that Windows Registry for Linux^W^W^W^W gconf exists.

>Icon Themes can change icon metaphors, leading to interfaces with icons that don’t express what the developer intended.

Icons were never sufficient metaphors to start with which is why we have text labels.

>Changing an app’s icon denies the developer the possibility to control their brand.

What does this even actually mean.

>User Help and Documentation are similarly useless if UI elements on your system are different from the ones described in the documentation.

This is only true if the user is completing an action that is solely based on clicking an icon with no text which we have already established is bad.

>The problem we’re facing is the expectation that apps can be arbitrarily restyled without manual work, which is and has always been an illusion.

Why has this worked generally fine in lots of ecosystems including gnome?

>If you like to tinker with your own system, that’s fine with us.

Earlier discussion seemed to suggest that lots of gnome developers were in fact not fine with this because it hurt gnomes "brand identity"

>Changing third-party apps without any QA is reckless, and would be unacceptable on any other platform.

Reckless?

> we urge you to find ways to do this without taking away our agency

Your agency?

> Just because our apps use GTK that does not mean we’re ok with them being changed from under us.

Nobody cares if you are OK with it.

Because it’s now possible to run multiple VMs at once (containers, etc) perhaps it’s time to run a simple, minimal, admin friendly hacker vm inside Ubuntu desktop?

Let Ubuntu configure all that it needs to get a good functional machine out of the box (working sleep mode for laptops, WiFi management, GPU support, systemd if that’s what it wants.) I then deploy the minimal VM I actually want to poke around with inside that installation.

This is pretty much what many people do in macOS. Apple’s OS supports the bare metal, vagrant / VirtualBox give me my tractably scrutable dev environment.

It’s not a particularly ground breaking concept but it might cheer me up a bit when battling with the volatility of user facing Linux distributions.

> Let Ubuntu configure all that it needs to get a good functional machine out of the box (working sleep mode for laptops, WiFi management, GPU support, systemd if that’s what it wants.) I then deploy the minimal VM I actually want to poke around with inside that installation.

If there's anyone like me here they might be happy to know that KDE Neon exists and is something like:

- Stable Ubuntu base.

- Infinitely (almost) customizable KDE on top.

- And (IMO unlike Kubuntu) sane defaults.

There is never going to be a unified GUI for Linux; that requires a dictator. KDE tried to provide the carrot of development-ease, Gnome tried to generate some reality distortion, but nobody cared. Carrots don't work. As far as I'm concerned, the experiment is over and it is time to embrace the chaos.

Now, this is easy for me to say, I'm mostly a command-line person anyway, and have spent most of my working life dealing with horrible UI. But it does have a lot of implications for Linux that I think a lot of people are not ready to accept.

You are spot on, and your 'book analogy' is perfect. If it works perfectly don't change it — that is unless an innovation arrives that offers a significant improvement and that's just as easy to use.

Unfortunately, most so-called UI improvements over the last 20 or so years are not improvements at all, in fact many have been quite regressive. They've annoyed millions of users who've collectively wasted millions of hours relearning what they already knew (and in the end nothing was added by way of new productivity)—and that doesn't include the developer's 'lost' time developing these so-called improvements. It's time that would otherwise have been much better spent fixing bugs, providing security improvements and or developing software for altogether new applications that we've not seen before.

The question I keep asking over and over again is what exactly are the causes behind all this useless 'over innovation'. Why is it done on such a huge scale and with such utter predictability?

Is it marketing's wish for something new? Are developers deliberately trying to find work for themselves or to keep their jobs or what?

It seems to me that many a PhD could be earned researching the psychological underpinnings of why so many are prepared to waste so much money and human effort continuing to develop software that basically adds nothing to improve or advance the human condition.

In fact, it's such an enormous problem that it should be at the core of Computer Science research.

Promotion & NIH management sydrome.

New shiny gets a promotion. Fixing a niche bug in a decades-old stable system does not.

And by the time all the new bugs you've introduced are found, you'll have a new job somewhere else.

So essentially, project managers' bosses not pushing back with a hard "Why should we change this?"

I’m probably missing some stuff, but I think people out to at least be able to “feel” their way around a UI. Lately there’s been so much push for minimalism like omitting scroll bars and such that make it confusing.

But, again that experimentation will root out what works and doesn’t. And new devices like VR of course have yet to be discovered paradigms.

> the stacking window managers work well from Windows 95 and XP why change it?

To get something that works better.

Despite all evidence to the contrary.

Well said. Is your machine shop stocked by a single brand of tools all in the same color, or is it a mix of bits and pieces accumulated, rebuilt, repainted, hacked, begged-borrowed-and-stolen over the course of your development as an engineer?

A free software Unix workstation is exactly the same. It’s supposed to look untidy. It’s a tool shed.

Apologies if I’ve touched a nerve with the Festool crowd with my analogy.

Agreed, but I can never get to the bottom of or reason why developers do not provide alternative UI interfaces (shells) so that the user can select what he/she wants. This would save the user much time relearning the new UI (not to mention a lot of unnecessary cursing and swearing).

For example, Microsoft substantially changes the UI with every new version of Windows—often seemingly without good reason or user wishes. This has been so annoying that in recent times we've seen Ivo Beltchev's remarkable program Classic Shell used by millions to overcome the problem of MS's novel UIs.

Classic Shell demonstrates that it's not that difficult to have multiple UIs which can be selected at the user's will or desire (in fact, given what it is, it has turned out to be one of the most reliable programs I've ever come across—I've never had it fault).

It seems to me that if developers feel that they have an absolute need to tinker or stuff around with the UI then they should also have at least one fallback position which ought to be the basic IBM CUA (Common User Access) standard as everyone already knows how to use it. If you can't remember what the CUA looks like then just think Windows 2000 (it's pretty close).

It's because everybody wants you to use their thing and not some other thing. If people have a choice then some people will choose something else.

This is especially true when the choice is to continue using the traditional interface everybody is already familiar with, because that's what most everybody wants in any case where the traditional interface is not literally on fire. Even in that case, what people generally want is for you to take the traditional interface, address the "on fire" parts and leave everything else the way it is.

Good change is good, but good change is hard, especially in stable systems that have already been optimized for years. Change for the sake of change is much more common, but then you have to force feed it to people to get anyone to use it because they rightfully don't want it.

Linux was all about chaos and herding cats until a short number of years ago.

It's the "standardisation at all costs" brigade who have killed the goose that laid the golden eggs. It's now far worse than Windows in many aspects. Freedesktop and GNOME deserve the lion's share of the blame, but RedHat, Debian and many others enabled them to achieve this.

Over the last decade, we have experienced a sharp loss of control and had certain entities become almost absolute dictators over how Linux systems are permitted to be run and used.

Linux started out quite clunky and unpolished. It could be made polished if you wanted that. But nothing was mandatory. Now that's changed. A modern mainstream Linux distribution gives you about the same control over your system that Windows provides. In some cases, even less. Given its roots in personal freedom, ultimate flexibility, and use as glue that could slot into all sorts of diverse uses, I find the current state of Linux to be an nauseating turn off.

And I say that as someone who has used Linux for 24 years, and used to be an absolute Linux fanatic.

Exactly, but what perplexes me is why aren't these issues that are so obvious to us not obvious to them. Why do they think so differently to normal users?