Hacker News Reader

Comment by dingdingdang | Hacker News Reader

Personally wish people would stop tinkering with the UI - polish but do not tinker/change needlessly. Case in point being that Linux likely remains fringe as a desktop platform simply because of it's continual tendency to morph on the UI side of things.

Then again, Win10 is going down the same route so maybe it will all even out (...).

View on HN

You mix UI and UX polish, and the UX on OpenOffice is honestly not very good ... I only had to use it the other day and struggled with finding half a dozen things that are just obvious with Word.

* obvious to Word users

For complete novices, yes the UI is not very intuitive. But Word isn’t much better either.

I recently had to start using Word again at work and even though the ribbons seem intuitive and user-friendly, actually finding the feature I needed has not always been easy. I’ve had to Google quite a bit (the help is excellent though).

At least in LibreOffice everything is always in the menus and does not suddenly disappear if your window is not wide enough.

Office now has a command search box.

I can recommend this read: https://careerfoundry.com/en/blog/ux-design/the-difference-b...

UX doesn't enter into my criticism here.

What does Linux (the kernel) have to do with UI? Unless you are creating kernel extensions, you don't directly interact with the Kernel?

You mean Gnome 3? There are other desktops.

"There are other desktops" is a symptom of endless tinkering with the UI.

Exactly this yes.

Or a recognition that one-size-fits-all doesn't work.

Different desktops have different goals.

I completely agree. I like having choice too. But for mass adoption you need a polished solution that works out of the box, not a bunch of Lego. The answers to users complaining shouldn't be "have you tried alternative software X?"

I think Gnome being the next default for Ubuntu will solve that problem, but mass adoption requires more than that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com