This also applies to software. “we’ve clean up our UI and stuffed every tool you use every day into menus and submenus! Now all your favourite tools are 1-2 extra clicks away. But look at all this white space!”
Most recent ofender was JIRA.
And then there is Blender.
‘How do I do…’
‘Keyboard Shortcut’
‘Okay and how d…’
‘Keyboard Shortcut’
‘And how…’
‘KEYBOARD SHORTCUT’.
You’d think that with such heavy reliance on shortcuts the UI would be sleek, but nuh uh, it’s an absolute mess.
‘How do I access this view?’
‘You just grab this random window boarder and drag it to out, wtf?’
Or in the case of software it’s ‘You don’t’ as all the options and customization no longer exist
Few things piss me off more than software removing options because it’ll confuse users. Just hide them away in an advanced options submenu. Hell, even put up a warning that messing with em isn’t supported, or let me modify a config file, but leave them in there somehow.
software removing options because it’ll confuse users
They remove (relatively) unused options because it takes time and money to maintain them and they’re always a source of potential bug reports. My least favorite example of this is all my music apps getting rid of list views (text-based rows where you can see 15-20 options on the screen at a time) in favor of thumbnail views where you only see a couple of options at a time.
“Oh, and the attachments have all been sleekified as well, so things like strain reliefs on the plugs have all been removed. Get ready to buy new attachments every ten months for no good reason.”
GNOME
To be fair, that is kind of in alignment with UNIX philosophy though right? Not to start a flame war, but it’s kind of KDE going against that by trying to do everything. (I still ❤️ u tho KDE)
I do concede that it’s massively annoying that plugins break every update though
GNOME has been heading in the direction of “these apps will not run elsewhere without GNOME, and will have a very particular, hard to modify look and feel” for quite some time at this point, so they’re at least as bad.
That’s largely why the Linux Mint team have been forking a lot of GNOME apps into their X-Apps project, so that in theory, those apps will continue to run anywhere, and look somewhat OK, regardless of desktop environment.
In hindsight, their choice of the letter X has aged rather poorly (any association to X11 was tenuous even at the outset, and then there’s the whole Twitter thing), but the project is still a noble one.
Gnome is sleek but definitely not KISS, and the fact that plugins break after every update should be proof enough. Bash scripts will work for years or decades without any modification; that’s the Unix philosophy. Yet write one .js extension for gnome and it will be obsolete by next year, even though devs point to the extension system to excuse themselves from implementing the most basic of features (at least they did ten years ago when I got fed up with their bullshit). And they don’t implement the most basic features because their philosophy is not Unix’s, but MacOS’s (specifically in all the ways that MacOS is not Unix).
People seem to find redeeming qualities to Gnome, and more power to them I guess. But “it is philosophically Unix” is just straight-up an incorrect statement.
Can I ask the opposite question.
What cool things can I plug into my phones USBC other than a power cord?