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Comment by canada_dry | Hacker News Reader

Sigh. I really wish Apple and Microsoft would re-acquaint themselves with these ancient Apple user interface guidelines/recommendations!

IMHO Microsoft has gone from the best UI to a horrible UI. No way of visually discerning what is a button or other GUI component and what isn't is not a improvement! The revolt due to their absurd VS GUI a while back is a great example, but it's the subtle UI changes in their current offerings that are most frustrating.

I switched to linux a while ago, and it has a long way to go ... but its an upward curve vs. Apple/MS's downward spiral when it comes to UI.

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> but its an upward curve vs. Apple/MS's downward spiral when it comes to UI

It's upward because it's trying to catch up with Windows and macOS...

As much as I would love to love Linux, besides elementary OS the trend is still to ignore looks and concentrate on code. Some apps are so poorly thought out in terms of UI that they're almost impossible to use.

There's bad, and then there's GIMP. GIMP's general UI thought is, "we thought you might need this button... sometime... maybe this week... so here it is".

Big time.

> Some apps are so poorly thought out in terms of UI that they're almost impossible to use.

Considering most of those apps probably are open source why don't you help out and improve them?

That's fine for a competent developer with a lot of time on their hands, but do you consider this to be a practical approach for the average Linux user?

Average users don't use Linux. Considering that you're getting thousands of man months for free by using the kernel and open source tools I would imagine you pitching in to help with a little bit of your time.

What about sysadmins, web developers... ? This is what I mean by average Linux user. These people aren't coding native apps all day.

The class of people qualified to contribute to open source Linux utilities is a subset of Linux users.

> Average users don't use Linux

You'd be surprised. My sister uses Ubuntu (no idea how she got the idea), and she's in a totally different field.

> Considering that you're getting thousands of man months for free by using the kernel and open source tools I would imagine you pitching in to help with a little bit of your time.

People release open source projects for different reasons.

I don't think it should be required physically or ethically to have to pitch in to help, even if one was capable of.

Fixing other people's code in a disk partitioner or text editor is not what I'm passionate about nor what I want to spend time on. Then, I'd rather pay (as I do) for Sublime Text and start working on things that I care about already (on macOS—which I definitely pay for).

Many reasons.

While I can tell that something is a pain to use, I'm not a designer, and I don't know how to fix it. Kind of when your car makes a noise or breaks down and you're not a mechanic.

I can't technically because I don't program for the desktop, and I don't have the time nor energy, and prefer/have to pay people to do it for me.

I have to tell you, I love how whenever someone criticizes Linux there's a comment saying "it's open source, fix it yourself". I think this is exactly the problem and attitude that plagues most Linux distros.

Criticizing is helping.

I don't see it. The problem with the large open source community projects recently (Unity, Firefox, etc) is that they go for flash instead of substance. This isn't just a bunch of bedroom hackers anymore, there's plenty of invasion of the designers making dumb decisions, too. But still, I prefer Linux on the desktop these days to the insanity of the other 2 major options.

I tried to stick to (old) Apple interface guidelines for a long time. Eventually I realised, for instance, that only tiny numbers of people need to be taught how to use a mouse.

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