It's not like the competitors are any better, in the desktop space at least.

The problem in my eyes is plateauing. Once a project moves past the first couple of iterations, it rarely interests the original authors enough to make incremental improvements. And since there is no financial incentive to continue, the project usually cools down to eventually be replaced by the following iteration. This means that you rarely get mature software.

Two things:

1) The GNU utilities have pretty good CLI UI design and there are plenty of us who are perfectly happy with just that and a decent WM like FVWM even on a phone

2) It's not like closed mobile stuff has a great UI either. My favorite example is Apple's camera app. Did you know you can do manual focus with it? It's absolutely impossible to discover but I think it involves a "reverse three finger pinch." I've even had it explained twice to me (and used it) and forgotten how to do it after. I can never remember how when I need it. This garbage makes the TAR UI look like it was designed by an artist.

I mean, you say "plenty", but it's going to be only a fraction of the number of people who are perfectly happy with that sort of thing on the desktop, which already isn't very many people (even if you assumed all *nix users sans Macheads were like this, which they're not).

And while you're right to say that mobile UI design can be bad, is the solution to that really throwing out mobile UI as a concept altogether in favor of ... a window manager designed for a mouse and ketboard, running text terminals on a tiny touchscreen?

> plenty of us

Which is a soooo tiny minority that it won't even show up on charts.

> It's absolutely impossible to discover but I think it involves a "reverse three finger pinch."

That's a shitty UX, not UI.

Can't have bad UI if there is no visible UI taps head

User interfaces are how you interact with a computer. That includes visual and non-visual elements. Widgets you tap on the screen, gestures you make with your fingers, hotkeys, and commands entered are all components of the UI. If you pinched your fingers together on a touch screen and the view started zooming in it would be just as bad as clicking on a magnifying glass with a '-' symbol and it zooming in, even though the former is not visible.

There is no three finger manual focus gesture on iPhone. Not sure where he got that from.

The Apple Camera app has no manual focus. It has autofocus, tap to focus and it has focus lock if you tap and hold.

How come your “favorite example” isn’t even a real example...

It turns out I was thinking of the exposure/brightness controll.

Sorry I don't use iOS very often (and very rarely use the camera app.)

I think my point still stands though. The UI is not at all discoverable (and not all that ergonomic either which is why most people might tolerate some lack of discoverability.)

The exposure/brightness control is not it either.

When you tap on your screen, the camera focuses on the point you tapped. It also adjusts the exposure to the point you tapped. And right next to where you tapped, a simple slider with a SUN ICON appears, and you can drag that slider to adjust the exposure.

The fact you don't use iOS and the Camera app, I'm fine with that. But you're telling everyone how bad the iPhone UI is without using it and misleading people about how it works. Not quite fair.

In any case, it's easy to pile on Apple, until you try to do it yourself. Let's see this Android OS match something at least half as usable as what the iPhone UI is. It took Android a decade to get there.

> The FOSS development paradigm seems to be allergic to good UI design

I'm having a hard time understanding what it is about the development paradigm that's allergic to good UI design. In good faith I'll assume you meant that "FOSS projects seem to lack good UI design". This I'll agree with, if we're talking about GUI design (others have pointed out that the CLI interfaces are usually great). I really don't think the lacking GUI design is necessarily inherent in FOSS, but I too wonder why more people with design skills aren't attracted to working on FOSS stuff.

Also don’t know about the paradigm per se, but I suspect a lot of FOSS developers are CLI first type users. Secondly, they are mostly not working in environments where GUI UX designers are part of the process. Thirdly, good UX design doesn’t happen by committee. Pure speculation on the first two.

Case-sensitive filesystems. Quod erat demonstratum.

Good UI design usually comes from one person knowing what they are doing and the programmers willing to follow. In OSS people are often motivated by full control.

Really? In many-person collaborative OSS projects, there seems to be a decent amount of belief that others can do better work than oneself.

You need to redesign your code architecture to fit the UI or you wont get a world class UI. That isn't what happens though, instead they hook in UI interactions so it looks like the designs but doesn't really work as well as you'd wish. I've never seen a developer who gladly did the architectural redesigns needed to make UI truly great.

> I'm having a hard time understanding what it is about the development paradigm that's allergic to good UI design.

There may not be causation, but there is definitely a strong correlation. KDE is approximately 2x as annoying to use as an intensive daily driver compared to a Windows 10 modded with OpenShell (aka Classic Shell) and a few smaller tweaks. I know this because I run them side by side, one for work and one for personal use. Don't get me started on Gnome Shell, it's a train wreck for those familiar with/expecting a classic GUI.

Modern UI on the phones makes discovering features really hard. One often ends up with searching obscure forums just to know very useful feature like IPhone trick with holding the space bar to move cursor.

I can understand that on 4” inch phones there were no space for extra buttons, but with 6” screens this became ridiculous. So much for “good” design.

I really miss Palm's zen. Great sweet spot of discoverability with a clutter-free design that didn't sacrifice functionality. I could even make the buttons do useful things instead of just opening a Bixby TOS I've declined a dozen times.

I have the Bixby button set to play/pause, and a long-press to turn on the flashlight. It works great.

Which you can only do if you agree to the tos...

I use an app called bxAxtions, and I'm pretty sure I didn't need to set up Bixby at all or agree to any terms of service (I can't remember for sure). I had to run some ADB commands to grant it extra permissions, and I think Bixby doesn't run at all.

I agree with you, but I think discoverability for me is a lot more critical for software I use infrequently versus something I'm glued to several hours a day.

I learned about the space bar trick after 2 years of using iPhone after my son showed me a post on a forum. This made fixing typos much more quicker.

I discovered that about a year ago. I'm sure there are some other obvious things I don't know. In general, most of us who have been using smartphones for 10 years or so are probably able to adapt to new features fairly easily (assuming we learn about them). But it's probably easy to overlook how overwhelming they might be to someone who has never touched one before.

Navigating settings on my new Android phone resembles "Where's Waldo?" more than anything else. The search bar at the top, while tantalising, doesn't actually work in finding any setting that I've tried.

The menus are inconsistent, options are divided into strange categories, there are several "rabbit hole" menus where entire trees of settings are tucked away rather than just put them at the top level. This could be partly down to having a Chinese phone, but some of those deep menus are from stock Android too.

Early Android phones were way nicer.

thank-you, I didn’t know of this feature. And I am using iPhone for over a year now. It was such a pain to get cursor to correct spot up until now. Please share if know of any catalog of such tricks.

Me too. Long time IOS user, have been continually frustrated by the somewhat recent cursor redesign (what was it, IOS 13?). Knowing this is a game changer for a lot of phone use, and it was completely unknown to me: a motivated tech-literate IOS fan. There really is something wrong with UI discovery here.

Swipe left and right on an SMS to reveal the timestamp and other stuff.

Blew my mind after tearing my hair out that this information was just gone. It's not gone, just hidden in a place you'd never think to look for it.

One hidden feature I quite like is the scroll up. Move a page a bit so that the scroll bar is visible and tap the clock.

I do this one on accident frequently (e.g. when trying to pull the top bar down to respond to a notification). I’m glad I know exactly what triggers it now so that maybe I can learn to quit triggering it all the time.

Not sure if apple really can be considered modern in a space developing as fast as that. From my pov apples ui is still the dated sister everyone is trying to copy from

Apples UI has been copied since as long as I’ve been alive

What is more modern?

It's a case of developer UI. Has nothing to being "allergic" to "good UI design".

Being able to design something friendly to the average user, yet powerful enough to be friendly to power users, is a very difficult task to accomplish.

Developers understand the latter quite well, I think, as they themselves are power user-types. The former... well, that requires having dedicated designers who know how the average user thinks, as well as perhaps guinea pigs in the form of the average user. And that might require a lot more funding, perhaps.

Often it feels like "developer UI" is just "slap some buttons around and hook them to the handlers, call it a day". At least that's how Gimp feels to this day.

If it worked well enough, and was stable enough, I think a lot of tech enthusiasts might make the switch. Same we we put up with Linux distros.

A friend has a pine phone and it’s just not good enough as a daily driver. Forget UI. It needs a reboot regularly.

I have a pinephone; it is not good enough. Very unstable; everything (apps/wm) just keep crashing randomly; I send in crash reports. And I try the latest images every month.

But yes, I think it would work. I would be happy with a phone that can run Linux desktop software with HDMI. It would need to be powerful enough (which the pinephone is very much not at all), not eat so much battery when the USB dock is plugged in with HDMI and, most importantly as you say, be stable as Linux. The pinephone feels very far removed from any of this.

Personally, I don't really care about the size of the phone; I gladly give up weight for more battery life (I will have to carry a battery anyway otherwise so why not inside the phone). I guess I would rather the (6.5inch) phone have an eInk display but plug into a screen for a full Linux desktop. But sure, there is no real money in that for phone makers as only people like me would buy them. With Android they are next to useless for me though, which is annoying as there are nice Android (eInk) phones out there if they would run Linux.

wow - now that you mention it. a smartphone with an eInk display. that would be rad!

You can buy them today [0]. No linux though :)

[0] https://www.e-ink-info.com/e-ink-devices/mobile-phones

On the other hand, I think designers aren't that into contributing to FOSS - traditionally designers have been more on "paid" side of computation.

Not sure about that, I just think that "design" has a lower barrier to entry.

A pure designer cannot one day find themselves writing code for a major piece of opensource software.

A pure programmer can find themselves arranging some UI and designing a logo on Inkscape, that won't look and feel great.

Put the two together and something magical can happen, though not always, as design is so easy the programmer can be overcome with hubris and discard or ignore the designer advice and do the designing himself, with obvious results.

It’s even worse, I think. Good UX design looks deceptively easy, but is actually incredibly hard. So hard that a lot of programmers don’t even recognize how terrible they are at it, or how high the skill ceiling actually is. They think UI design is pretty colors and rounded buttons.

In a functioning software company, the managers recognize this skill difference and simply order the developers to implement what the designers suggest. They grumpily do. (It’s obviously not always so stereotypical. I’m exaggerating to make a point.)

In a typical OSS project, no one can give orders. The programmers ignore any good design suggestions because they don’t recognize those, and implement their own crappy ideas instead. Sometimes while arrogantly dunking on the designer who tried to make a contribution. Consequently, UX quality is abysmal, and anyone who could fix that is driven away. I don’t see a solution to this.

I think part of the problem is also that it's sometimes more difficult to implement a nice and usable design. Instead, it may be easier to write code that does everything it needs to, but forces the user to jump through hoops to get what they want.

Sometimes making software more user-friendly may even cause the code to get more "ugly", because instead of a nice and elegant piece of software that only solves the core problem, you now have to deal with all the weirdnesses of how people perceive the problem as well. Taking away complexity on the user's side almost always adds complexity to the code. And if you're the developer, it's very easy to think that the tool you created is perfectly usable, because you understand everything about the mental model that went into it.

As a product design lead, your comment and the comment you’re replying to reflect my experiences both with open source and with commercial development. For me, part of the solution has been learning how to communicate with developers. I’ve also found it helpful to broaden the scope of UX I consider to include the developer experience, data processing workflows, and the design of CLI and API interfaces.

>In a typical OSS project, no one can give orders. The programmers ignore any good design suggestions because they don’t recognize those, and implement their own crappy ideas instead. Sometimes while arrogantly dunking on the designer who tried to make a contribution. Consequently, UX quality is abysmal, and anyone who could fix that is driven away. I don’t see a solution to this.

Generally, going into an open source project as a stranger and suggesting to make architectural changes without expectation of pushback is not a good idea. Any change there is going to trample on someone else's workflow. You have to build up trust first before people see you as an authority, that is the solution and it's often the only one. It's worked for some projects such as the recent post about Audacity, even though it's a bit of an extreme example because the person was already established as a well-known designer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26995610

I don't blame the programmer for dismissing suggestions they don't understand but it's also not cool if you were "dunked on" so I'm sorry if that was your experience. Keep in mind that's still better than some, a lot of projects will just ignore suggestions completely if they figure you're just not part of their target audience, and they don't have the budget to expand that audience.

No need to be sorry, I'm not the designer in this story -- I'm the grumpy sofware engineer, and nowadays sometimes the manager. I'm also a desktop Linux user who is regularly annoyed by the sad and confusing state of opensource UX. What makes me so pessimistic is that I know the social dynamics that typically cause this, and have seen them play out in lots and lots of mailing list discussions.

Of course that's not a logical inevitability, things can change with more understanding. Your link actually makes me very happy, I hadn't seen this. Let's hope that this works out, and becomes a model that more OSS project can follow.

Programming a complex system can be achieved from the bottom up: Volunteers keep adding and sharing stuff. Old stuff becomes obsolete. The system marches on.

UI design in contrast is a top-down effort. You can't just mix and match various works from people. It's about information flow and consistency. A unified interface has to be agreed upon, and then implemented across the board. And any part of the system that fails to meet that standard, essentially breaks the UI.

> I don’t see a solution to this.

User testing. Making user feedback the key driver of UI related decisions.

> I don’t see a solution to this.

Brain computer interfaces… UI's as they exist today are merely an abstraction layer for getting the brain to engage with and process information.

> They think UI design is pretty colors and rounded buttons.

Most people, let alone programmers, don't realize there's more to "design" than pictures.

I think the absolute majority of developers aren't contributing to FOSS either.

Or perhaps there are too many designers? Or overconfident programmers who think they can do the design work?

I'd say it's neither. Demoscene is a good example of when designers and programmers were working well together.

Deviantart was a huge platform where people would share art and designs/skins. To some extent that still exists for iOS views.

I think one thing that's different about the deviantart model was that back then apps used to have skinning interfaces. And then designers could focus on just skinning. You could argue that gnome themes are like that. I would disagree, but also skinning isn't quite the same as doing ux.

UI/UX on Mac is a lot easier than UI/UX on gtk applications or QT applications.

On top of that, I don't think most designers understand OSS. It's basically a different universe and these two world don't often interact.

This totally proves the point above of programmers not having the first clue about UX design, why it's hard and makes a the whole difference. It is everything BUT "skinning".

It's about the users and their ability to understand how to work with your software to address their needs and expectations... not about your code, the designer or the manager. Those people are the product, NOT the user.

If I had a dollar for every programmer and manager that thought they knew better and stubbornly cooked up a crappy MVP nobody wanted, I would be able to fund your OSS.

To be fair, GP said "but also skinning isn't quite the same as doing ux."

If there's an OSS funded by developers cooking up crappy unwanted MVPs, I want in.

Right now I have ten crappy MVPs to donate and can put down $20 to sponsor others. I could probably have another 5 MVPs out within the next week if work is slow.

You judge from subjective view. Should we all? I do not like macOS and Windows experience. It is full of distractions.

http://sergeykish.com/side-by-side-no-decorations.png

> You judge from subjective view. Should we all? I do not like macOS and Windows experience. It is full of distractions.

You judge from a subjective view. There's no discoverability in the screenshot you shared.

It's all subjective and a product for the mass market looks different from a product that serves a very specific niche.

Absolutely. I've mimicked subjective view of parent comment. I trade discoverability for immersion and space. Apple is famous of its discoverability issues.

Nowhere article stated it's going to be year of Linux userland on the smartphone. It states hope for existence of a niche.

> It is full of distractions

Define distraction in terms of computing first.

Popups, weird confirmation dialogs nobody reads, configurations hidden in X different uis without console interface, the amount of screen space wasted for whatever reasons and the possibility that the wasted space contains text and icons that suddenly start to blink and move (attention seeking apps), ....

I feel distracted working on Windows or Mac. As if someone is putting stones everywhere and i have to mangle inbetween

I don't see how any of this happens all the time. If I were to maximize terminal and IDE/Browser I won't see those things either.

You are likely more used to it than i am. Thing is even if i maximize my terminal on windows or mac, how much can i actually do without switching context to get some things done. Switching between software is also not what i consider distructing. Its the how, the discovery of files and software, the switching between windows, switching between possibly dozens of windows of the same kind. How many key strokes are some actions away? (Given mac is a lot better in this degree than windows).

Some approaches on linux, be it gnome or kde or tiled solutions are just so much more efficient

You've just described it, you need intermediate step of maximizing. You can get away from distraction for a while.

Funny, absolutely everything you said applied to Ubuntu last time I tried it.

There are so many groups in Linux. Ubuntu was oriented towards Windows users. Check out Arch Linux pkgstats [1]:

* gnome-shell is GNOME

* plasma-workspace is KDE

* i3-wm and sway — tiling WM and its Wayland successor

* xmonad — WM building framework

Note: these are installed packages among those who opted in, does not strictly reflects usage. Some fun statistics [2].

[1] https://pkgstats.archlinux.de/compare/packages#packages=gnom...

[2] https://pkgstats.archlinux.de/fun

Ubuntu is a horrible example for well one UX or even a stable linux system. Times change, and i totally agree thats its hard to see trough as average user.

Everything that's not related to my current task. For example Windows UI constantly reminds me of

* application name

* ability to max, min, move

* list of running applications

* ability to run other applications

* content length and my progress

* actions on content

I don't need any of these. Like Amazon Echo users probably don't require ever present poster of available actions. Instead I have places — several of work places, generic browsing, messaging, media controls, services.

I’m not sure why this got downvoted - it’s a very clear expression of a real issue, and it’s definitely easier to solve it on Linux.

I choose to use Mac OS, and I celebrate each time they take a step in solving these problems - e.g. making the menu bar hidable, but I am fully aware that if I want something better in these ways I will need to use Linux and customize it to my tastes.

It seems to me that the root cause is that OSS is often developed by people already using it. They are used to weird interface and not benefiting from it being usable by newbies.

So there is much smaller motivation to improve it.

And even if someone new joins project they will be often also used to weird interface once they contribute.

I think it's simpler than that. Unpaid developers overwhelmingly prefer to work on the intellectually "sexy" problems such as encryption or compilers, to the detriment of the boring-yet-important stuff like UI improvements and hardware compatibility (let alone proper QA).

It's even simpler than that. Who wants to work on changing a UI that they themselves are comfortable with? It's work with - best case - no benefit in the eyes of the developer. Worse, you likely will break workflows - including your own. Sexyness doesn't need to factor in at all.

And do note the nice uncanny valley of no change: in order to improve the UI, you need to understand the program well. In order for that to happen, you need to be proficient with it. In which case, you know how to use the UI and are more likely blind to its downsides.

One more thing: some people have no eye for aesthetics. I’ve seen (smart) people defend a piece of code, and when I show them a refactored version, they say “that’s literally the exact same thing I wrote.”

No it’s not, and yes it is, in the sense that’s a^2 + 2ab + c^2 is not the same thing as (a+b)^2, but they (should and ideally must) evaluate to the same thing. I say ideally because only in the case of using infinite precision arithmetic can you guarantee this for all values of a,b,c.

People blind to these patterns cannot see how to simplify things, whether math or code or UIs.

Was the use of c^2 intentional?

Lol no.

I think developers and most users simply don't even notice the problems.

When I say "I can't use program X because the UI/UX sucks, is there any alternative?" people come out and say "I see no problem with program X, I use it everyday and it rocks"

Vim rocks, yet a lot of people can't use it. Once you state "X sucks", someone would object.

You've got strange conclusion out of it.

Yes. And good UI design requires a look of work and effort to get it right. You need many skills, or a good team to do it and that's rare in FOSS.

In my opinion, improving user experience isn’t something that is easily done piecemeal. It’s one of those things that can require architectural changes to get right, and so it’s difficult to improve on existing projects. Fixing bugs and making things faster is “easier” in a sense because the end goal is obvious and you can target specific portions of code to make immediate improvements. Improving UX can mean making many architectural changes before being able to reap any fruit from your labor. I say this as someone who has worked on a lot of apps. I can’t imagine the difficulty of making several pull requests and getting them accepted without any clear output in the product itself.

If you're suggesting that this is done out of selfishness or intellectual fervor then I don't think that's true. I wouldn't say they "prefer" it but it's certainly easier and more economical for a skilled person to contribute to those tools because the developers and the users are the same group of people.

Once you decide you need to do user testing and hardware testing, the cost shoots up. You need to start procuring hardware and finding a place for it to live so automated tests can run on it all the time. That costs money. You need to bring in a lot more testers which requires project management and/or volunteer coordinators. Usually that costs money too. Everything you do needs to go through more stages of design review which also requires extra coordination and project management. These are real things you can have but someone's got to foot the bill.

> Once you decide you need to do user testing and hardware testing, the cost shoots up.

It is not so bad.

Take three people who never used given software, ask them to do the most basic tasks. And fix the most common problems.

Your (and mine) software is much harder to use than you expect.

You do not need UI/UX people, massive scale testing to fix low hanging fruit.

Just my experience, three people is not a big enough sample size for most projects. You will get very biased opinions if you go with that. That may be ok if you have a very niche project and you only ask some people in that niche.

> You will get very biased opinions [with 3 testers]

Your anecdote is atypical.

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/why-you-only-need-to-test-w...

Or when you have obvious problems!

Take it with pile of salt, I am not some big expert. I just did it with some projects. But it seems to me that in nearly all cases there are glaring issues that would be detected with any amount of testing at all.

It depends on what you mean by design.

Modern proprietary OS (mobile and desktop) certainly have more polish, aesthetic taste and cohesion - that last one being the most valuable when compared to much of FOSS. But in terms of usability I'm not convinced they are any better unless we are going back a good 20 years. They have improved looks at the cost of performance and significant ambiguity and thus mental overhead in learning and general operation.

It's easy to make a light OS when no one uses it.

I'd much rather use any Linux than Windows 10.

Why?

Not parent poster, but the interface works as a plaster that obfuscates the stuff I need. Add to it the many mobile imports pushed onto the user (don't care about cloud? Well, W10 cares, and it will push it at every turn) and you get a product that's built to push how Microsoft thinks you should use your computer.

My aging father has used Microsoft OSes since dos, and W10 is the first product he's having real trouble moving to. The reason for that is that he's always been a pc user, and W10 is pushing mobile ux, with a very hard opt-out.

Original question was regarding UI. What's wrong with W10 UI?

Neither of the parents' posters, but my gripes with Windows 10 come down to these:

- Unreliability of UI elements (mixed responsiveness, difficult to see what are buttons and what are labels)

- Too much wasted space in their current design language, and related to that

- Too much distraction by visual eye candy (background images behind buttons in the email client, for example)

- Somehow, despite having every advantage in manufacturer driver support, still laggy animations

- After years, search is still bad and unpredictable, to the point I have to type "updat" to go to Windows Update because "update" will take me to Bing to tell me about how to update my PC.

- Inconsistencies. Many of those are because of the decades of backwards compatibility, which I can forgive, but even the modern Windows 10 apps have inconsistent designs[1]. Icons from four Windows versions that can all be seen on the same screen if you navigate deep enough through the seconds, even though Windows uses a unified resource loading mechanism for most system resources.

None of the alternatives are perfect, of course, but some are just _less worse_ in my opinion. Compared to the W10 shell, Gnome feels much snappier to me. Also, after finally fixing the bug that made the Windows 10 start menu break, a new start menu bug has been introduced to my system that makes it impossible to use the search bar in the start menu when it's opened start button on my left screen, breaking "winkey > program name > enter" _again_.

On Linux, audio sometimes breaks, or external monitors only work after an update. When nothing breaks, the system works great. On Windows, everything always kind of works, but not completely. Whatever I'm trying to do, something is broken in a way that's not bad enough to invest time into fixing, but still annoys me to no end. On macOS, you need to buy the expensive Apple hardware or it won't work at all. I have no need for expertly-graded colour-accurate screens sporting extreme resolutions, but you don't get any other options if you want to experience the macOS UI. I can't say much about the most recent macOS UI because I can't even run it, which makes it impossible to compare.

Of these three, I've settled with Linux, especially Gnome, as the "least broken" UI.

In the mid to late years of Windows 7, the Windows UI greatly outperformed most alternatives. With Windows 8, the system got very usable after the 8.1 update came out. After Windows 10, with the introduction of "operating system as a service", the UI seems to be in a perpetual state of "nearly finished, just needs a few more updates" because of the constant addition of more features and integrations.

[1]: Although it's been improving, I still notice stuff like this every now and then: https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/7aw5ps/i_just_no...

Not the parent poster, but Windows 10 is turning into a managed consumer cloud endpoint, rather than remain a power user/prosumer-friendly personal computing platform with privacy in mind.

> I'd be shocked if it took off.

Its not about taking off - it's about having an alternative that is available even if it's just for 0.01% of users.

> just for 0.01% of users

Who will develop it, why and most importantly what will it provide compared to alternatives?

Both big Linux Desktops(KDE/GNOME) do try to make the desktop UIs design work on a small screen. Phosh/phoc is mostly GNOME Design and Plasma mobile is KDE.

And that's the point of libhandy(for GTK/GNOME apps) and Kirigami(KDE) to take desktop Applications and make them work on smaller screens. So you can use the same applications on the phone and Linux desktop. And nice bonus is that optimizing the applications to have low CPU usage will have a positive effect on the linux desktop too.

In the case of postmarketOS to give that devices a second life(Hard work cause mainline linux support of most android Phones is bad).

It won't provide more features, but the one I want is definitely less tracking of everything through my phone, which is built-in with current vendors.

Yes, bad UI design exists. On the other hand, good UI design is largely a matter of what people are familiar with. This is true of both open source and commercial software. If we see bad UI design in open source software more, it is likely a product of open source software being more accessible. (People are more likely to try something they can download for free than something they have to pay $1000, $100, or even $10 for.)

Gnome 3 is by far one of the most modern approaches to desktops and personally i dig the look.

Imo these days where foss ment ugly gui are slowly over

I think that Linux UI is good. I’m using Windows because I need iCloud, otherwise Linux is better.

We have GNOME 40 now which is beautiful.

I can imagine it would be beautiful on mobile pretty soon as well.

I sometimes find it hard to understand the GNOME's design rationale. When GNOME 40 moved the dock from the left side to the bottom of the screen, it created an ergonomic problem for mouse users, who now need two large mouse gestures to switch apps -- first to the upper left corner to reveal the dock, then all the way to the bottom. And in the issue thread[1], Gnome's designers seem to be carefully avoiding the obvious solution of a hot bottom edge, proposed by several commenters, which is how Mac OS has always handled an auto-hiding dock.

https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/Design/os-mockups/-/issues/68

I don't really understand the rationale either, but it's easy to add a hot bottom edge with this extension:

https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/4222/hot-edge/

Of course it depends on the person, but I have never really used the dock for anything. I usually use the overview, or start typing the name of the app I want, or even more often just apt tab to it.

I hope you are joking. I have Fedora 34 with Gnome 40 right now on my gaming PC as a second system and I can barely find two windows (not even apps, just two windows) that can be defined as "nicely done". Everything else is terrible. Even worse once you start looking for apps on he net. Everything that is not Electron-base is simply ugly, constructed without any thought about UX.

Not joking. Everything Electron is actually the opposite: ugly. It doesn't blend well at all (maybe macOS Electron is a bit better). Native GTK apps are beautiful, which one you don't like? Only applications that are not on latest GTK might look out of place, but I am talking all the new stuff, from Calendar to Maps.

You might have hit on a solution here: Electron, or, ideally, a really nice mobile-first web browser with access to APIs provided by the underlying Linux OS.

I’m essentially imagining a phone OS that decouples the front-end and backend design. Implement the apps as APIs. Implement the UI using HTML5 so more designers can use their existing skills to contribute & the GUI layer can be replaced more easily. The experience would be a refinement of pulling a Docker image and opening a browser to use it on localhost.

Edit: a mobile OS also needs a really nice mobile-first shell app. People do so much with text messaging now that I think they might be open to it…

There's a prior attempt in the form of Firefox OS, which tried to push the “Web technology as driver of local UI” thing. Some cursory looking around suggests that webOS may also have done this, but I'm not as sure (it would make sense from the name).

You're basically describing WebOS and FirefoxOS.

WebOS lives on as LuneOS (and runs on the pinephone), but FirefoxOS effectively went closed source and became KaiOS.

Flutter or something similar + your backend of choice.

if you thing gnome4 is good design then linux phone is dead

What desktop approach do you consider to be modern? Or do you like to stick to the “win95“ approach of desktops?

> We have GNOME 40 now which is beautiful.

Don't know about that, chief. Looks like a same old Gnome.

Sorry but I can't stand these kind of generalizations... it's at the same level of "Everybody from <country> is <something>". I've seen many proprietary projects with a budget for UI development equal to zero (and yes, the UI indeed sucked).

Did you actually see the design of Phosh? It was developed by actual paid designers, not by programmers.

The idea it has to “take off” is silly. It could certainly be something similar to raspberry pi. Small market but really popular. It’s already on its way there.

I totally agree. Establishing a sustainable niche is enough.

I “just” need a browser.

Do you have specific thoughts on phosh, plamo, or lomiri?