It also requires you to wait until the animation has finished. I regularly lose the first character or two of my password, because I start typing too soon, while it’s still animating away

iOS has been this way for a couple versions, and I can't imagine how it ever passed testing.

Animations that block use input are the sort of stupidity that becomes evil in its own regard. There was even a calculator but with this. This is a massive failure at the management level; somebody actually codes these things, but that it's not caught anywhere before shipping shows that the wrong people are in charge.

It's the sin of losing the user input.

Don't make your user repeat something twice :)

I do not have this experience on the screen lock screen (on Ubuntu 18.04 at least) — just typing a password will put the full password into the box once the animation is gone.

I do not log-in frequently enough to remember how it behaves on log-in (even my laptop has ~90 days of uptime).

FWIW, moving away from GNOME 2.x to either Unity or GNOME 3 was a hard move to swallow, though in all honesty, Unity was better (though pretty buggy and laggy until the end)!

When Ubuntu have removed Gnome2, I have looked at Unity, got really unhappy about it and installed gnome3. ... In a few minutes, I started to think that Unity wasn't THAT bad, after all, and went back to it.

Now when it is gone, I'm using xfce, which seems be the last decent desktop environment.

Another one to add:

Besides waiting for animation, in Windows 10, if you type the password fast enough the first character gets selected and the second character you type will replace it.

This happens frequently.

It's not just the logon screen. In many apps if you type CTRL+O followed by a file name to bring up the File Open dialog and populate the name field then the application frequently loses the first few characters of the file name. Or type CTRL+T followed by text. This opens a new tab but the text appears in the old tab if you don't pause.

These things used to work reliably. I think most of the problems are caused by introducing asynchronicity into apps without thinking about how it affects keyboard input. Keyboard input should always behave like the app is single-threaded.

Application developers have ceased to care about input focus for keyboard entry.

Here's an example I encounter whenever I use Microsoft Teams at work. I go to "Add Contact", and the entire screen becomes a modal entry box into which I have to enter a name. There's a single entry field on the screen. It's not in focus, even though that's the sole action that I can perform at this time. I have to explicitly select the entry field with the mouse and then type. It's such a basic usability failure, I really do wonder what both the application developers and the testers are actually doing here. This used to be a staple of good interface design for efficient and intuitive use.

It is the same on chrome or firefox. Empty window only with url bar. You need to type in the url bar to write something. Writing software is hard. Using your brain while writing software is even harder.

Learn this habit: press backspace a couple times first, to wake up the screen and show the password input.

Lol, you've just described such a beautiful regression...

On my Windows 10 if I press a key nothing happens. My fiction is something else has taken the focus away from the "login app". If I press Alt-Tab then suddenly another key will wake up the login app and give me a password prompt.

I always just press a CTRL key on both Windows 10 and Ubuntu.