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Comment by mech422 | Hacker News Reader

I agree - I love the old '3d' interfaces, and Aqua in particular. The new 'cell phone' interfaces are just a PITA. Really hard on my old eyes - no real indication/border around buttons, no color cues, often not even a place to grab the window and drag it around. Everything is just the same drab shades with no differentiation between elements.

As the 'cell phone' folks get older and eyesight gets worse, I think we'll see things shifting back. I basically don't use a cell phone for anything except 2fa cuz the silly lil screens are too hard to read.

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Hot take: the current mobile flatness we see all around mostly serves dark patterns schemes and it's anti-user by default. It's easier to hide options within an interface that has no clearly distinction between link and the button, the interactive object and just the decoration. That helps trick users to pick something they didn't want or make them keep the defaults that works against them.

And by the way, may I suggest you try to search on the Internet what GNOME desktop environment developers did to theming with their libadwaita and flat Adwaita design. For a start: https://www.osnews.com/story/133955/gnome-to-prevent-theming...

Thats another pet peeve of mine - web pages where every pixel is some sort of link/hotspot. Like I just wanted to activate the window, or grab some whitespace and scroll. Not switch tabs, not maximize the window and definitely not navigate away to some ad or whatnot.

Also, am I the only one sketched out by the javascript ads with the internal 'x' close buttons? Its obviously part of the ad, and not the program chrome/controls. For all I know, it's just a redirect to pwnme.com :-P

> web pages where every pixel is some sort of link/hotspot

Or while trying to copy a link or text on page - you gotta grab it perfectly otherwise everything else gets selected. So you're maneuvering like under microscope at the very beginning or end of the text.

Similar thing I'm experiencing on Xfce: some themes use this very slim window borders which are almost impossible to grab to resize. And since there's no grab to resize widget in the bottom right corner (it used to be once a standard, I'm pretty sure), upper right corner near the close button is the way.

Sometimes its easier to select stuff from the end to beginning... I thought it was my imagination, but then a browser developer wrote about it in their blog or something.

I was always camp KDE - but that libadwaita thing sounds horrible... Maybe Rasterman is due for a comeback - enlightenment desktop looks pretty nice!

libadwaita disallowing themes is not a user-hostile decision (rather an accessibility one), nor are themes impossible. https://blogs.gnome.org/alatiera/2021/09/18/the-truth-they-a...

I think I have some cognition issues, and can only read eink and off of crisp OLED. Love touch screens, pointers etc. But don't much like Apple iOS style.

heh - I have fat fingers on top of everything else, so touch screens always turn into "where did I leave the #$%#$%^ stylus" :-D

TBH - I work from home, so I'm never more then 20 feet from real monitors. So I just use the phone for 2FA stuff...

Oh God I am still pretty fat fingered on a phone. But I do like the 'tactile' simplicity. I still think touchscreen UI / OS is in its infancy, and could be better. But am amazed in some ways that it's as good as it is.

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