How on god's green earth is a 30 year old operating system more customizable and user-friendly than any of the modern interfaces (that includes both windows 10 and gnome)
God don't get me started, I've really come to hate how Windows 10 looks. I come from a time where 8 extra bits of color depth cost you an arm and a leg (1,5 arms and 2 legs adjusted for inflation) and you were willing to fight a war for 5 extra pixels of screen real estate. Anti-aliasing was just a dream.
Now we have full HD screens with 32 bit colors and HDR, powerful GPUs to draw edges as smooth AF and what did we decide to do with all of that? Use 4 colors, fill it up with whitespace and cram everything into squares.
I think the Windows 10 UI was created by a group of depressed people and it really shows.
The Windows 11 UI is telling the same people ”now imagine everyone has a tablet”.
You’ll likely get some pushback along the lines of ”We already tried that with Windows 8 and everyone hated it”, but keep pushing - quote something about Henry Ford and horses if neccessary
Microsoft keeps trying really hard to make touchscreens happen. Except they aren't going to happen. It's a desktop OS for mice and keyboards first and foremost, it's about time they acknowledge that by designing everything with these input devices in mind.
I think Windows 11 is trying to unify the settings etc to something similar to mobile OSs, but at the same time is ditching the lingering remnants of touch interfaces from Windows 8.
IIRC, they now have guidelines to not assume spacing, icon sizes, etc optimized for touch unless touch is the only interface available.
I think they should just roll the UI back to what it was in Windows 7 and then stop working on it (the UI, not Windows itself), forever. Yes, I'm serious.
I'm darn sure I've read a statement somewhere that all modern UI uses rounded corners on every widget because the pointy ones were giving users threatening vibes and made them feel unwelcome.
Meanwhile I upgraded (downgraded?) from Neon to windows 11 on one of my laptops. On more than one occasion I assumed I was using KDE plasma. Firefox renders basically the same between the two, all of my apps run on windows and Linux (steam, VLC, etc).. it’s the nuance in notifications that threw me into uncanny valley. Also made me realize the two things that I need from a desktop are a solid notification system (kde is ok, I like how it’s done in windows 11 and on macOS) and a smooth mouse experience. Everything in the UI is just a skin and can be emulated or replaced
> Use 4 colors, fill it up with whitespace and cram everything into squares.
For me the worst of those is the prevalence of whitespace, and the loss of the grey background.
Grey was the greatest color for UI background, it wasn't overly bright, it won't burn your eyes like modern UIs that shine like a thousand suns, no need for separate "dark theme" because a grey theme is comfortable in all light conditions, it allowed the content color to go in two different directions (if your background is white then your content can only get darker, but if your background is grey your content can be darker or brighter than the background), and it has a clear visual separation between the grey app UI (menus, toolbars, ...) and the white content (E.G. document being edited).
Exactly this happens every time in my company. Designers and PMs wants to « educate » the user and force a strict workflow for them. They never take into account that power users exists.
Sure, most of our users are happy this way because our product replaces shitty and complex excel sheets. But I always wonder about the 1% who took the time to learn and master excel and were fast with their tool. For those people, our product must be a PITA, because their is no other (faster) way to work than the path PMs and designers decided.
But in theory: It's as customisable as you want. You "just" need to write it. The linked 3.11 project is not just a customisation - it's a whole shell just like Cairo.
Gnome is disgustingly restrictive, and the general reddit trend of "ricing" unix windows managers is no better. It feels like we lost the plot on user-friendly expandable GUIs around the Vista era.
