Why did *nix give up on trying to create a useful and innovative user interface just to clone Windows?

Wallpaper sauce please?

There's nothing really wrong with the traditional Windows conception of the desktop. The real problem is that no one, not even Windows, actually sticks to it any more.

What do you mean by "innovative user interface"?

Yes there is, it's outdated and inefficient. It was fine for the time, but absolutely not for 2018.

>it was fine
>then it became the current year
>then it was not fine

idk, ask canonical why they gave up making unity

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because users stopped caring about innovation once everyone copied the xerox alto

>vision and hierarchical organization
yes because that got us wonderfully designed things that have no flaws whatsoever such as windows 10, iOS 11, material design, etc

are you kidding me? the problem with GNOME is that there are too many design shits trying to streamline everything

because they realized they were wasting their time maintaining a bad clone of GNOME Shell

I find it hilarious that everyone turned on Canonical for allegedly trying to do what Red Hat were actually doing.

iOS 11/Material Design were user interfaces that WERE legitimately "innovative" and specifically designed to try and evolve mobile user interfaces beyond skeuomorphic design. Material Design was ugly as hell but they made it a point of saying that it existed to ensure that ANY developer could easily adhere to Android's visual design with little additional effort.

>it was """"fine"""""
>we should stop expecting better from software because everything should remain as mediocre as possible
>expectations dont change over time

There's probably better ways to manoeuvre a car than a wheel and pedals, but no one changes it because it's fine. It works. It's a conception everyone understands.

Windows UI became unusable horseshit, what should be the reason to clone it?

>point this direction
>stop
>go
literally what better method do you have

The only improvisation of the last years is clientside window-decorations ... you know, buttons and shit in the Window-frame.
Also, please don't tell me about Ribbons ... everytime I see this unholy mess of icons on the screen I wan't to scratch my eyes out.

If you were applying the same standards to cars as to UI you'll be complaining about all sorts of things, like why stop and go are the same action, or why you have to perform so many actions (hand movements, passing the wheel) to go from full lock to full lock.

And much like UIs it might be fun to think about changes as a thought exercise, there's really no point messing with it because everyone understands its concepts.

windowmaker is a clone of nextstep, which evolved into os x after removing the bad features

microsoft and apple both tried to have user interface standards many times, nobody followed them because designers would rather just do their own shit, now the same thing is happening on android

btw the skeumorphisms are still there, there are still many apps loaded with nonsensical physical analogies, they're just worse because they now they don't even look like the physical analog anymore because everything has been invaded with "flat design"

WindowMaker does look really nice.

This. Freetard GUIs suck shit because there's a bunch of competing toolkits and frameworks. All sorts of GTK and Qt and other shit, and every window manager uses different themerc files and image names. I mean don't get me wrong, this software works fine, it's just inconsistent and ass ugly.

>yes because that got us wonderfully designed things that have no flaws whatsoever such as windows 10, iOS 11, material design, etc
Internally these products suffer from the same issue that freetard software does. The management has failed to crack down on this stupid shit, mostly because it's the lazy option and can be pushed out quickly. You should look at systems like Mac OS 9, IRIX, OpenVMS, NeXTSTEP, and even early Windows NT versions like NT 4 and Windows 2000. These are nice looking systems that have depth and character, and real work went into those designs.

Is there a good reason to move beyond skeuomorphic design? Because software was a lot better when toolkits like Motif were used. Everything looked and felt a lot nicer. Computers felt more like an expensive piece of hand crafted furniture, and now they feel like cheap and disposable pieces of garbage that aren't meant to last.

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nigga, wallpaper please.

The problem with skeumorphism these days is that there's no "object" for them to represent. What would be the icon for a music player? A hi-fi? A CD? Well, the object people use for their music is their phone, so the icon would have to be a phone. Same with address book, e-mail, video, etc.

skeumorphism is absolutely disgusting.

Stop being a noob and use i3wm or something similar.

i used to use gnustep back in the day. it's a damn fine and consistent interface, a shame everything went the gtk / qt route

Maybe MacOS 9 and NT4 looked good / consistent on the surface but to use and administer they were god awful shit.

You aren't wrong, but this is a discussion about GUIs. Those operating systems had nice graphical interfaces.

Just post the wallpaper for fuck sake, I couldn't care less about your window decorations and shit

>Mac OS 9
the beginning of apple's dark period with skeumorphisms aka aqua, pic related
>OpenVMS
>IRIX
anything based on motif was a horrendous clunky mess made by unix sysadmins with no UI experience
>NT 4 and Windows 2000
same as windows 95 but with more useless webshit added
>NeXTSTEP
the only good thing you named and they fucked it up by getting too far away from smalltalk and merging it with Mac OS

that wasn't what the backlash against skeumorphism was about, it was about stupid microsoft bob-type shit like photos and documents shown as papers popping out of a folder, music/book apps having wooden shelves that you have to scroll through, volume controls looking and behaving like the dials on a radio, etc

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>reverse image search
>found the wallpaper
And you can't have it, newfag.

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Quite literally the most retarded analogy, especially as cars are LITERALLY refined and re-conceptualized every single fucking year.

>anything based on motif was a horrendous clunky mess made by unix sysadmins with no UI experience
>t. has only used CDE trash
Try buying an old SGI machine and booting up IRIX. You won't talk shit about it ever again when you see how polished and beautiful that UI is.

wrong. the problem with GNOME is that technical people are NOT doing the design

>This
>Beautiful
Face it nerd, flat design like material design is best and will be the global standard for the rest of human history.

>t. has a bullshit hippie art degree and has his head up his own butt

>t. An out of touch nerd who values being esoteric over actual functionality

>smalltalk
it makes me fucking sad firing up a smalltalk environment and realizing what computing could have been.

Flat shit is both ugly and non-functional. I can't tell which round blob shuts down the PC and which opens a browser anymore. It's absolute trash.

Thanks, I was phone posting.

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There were different UIs on Unix once. X Athena Widgets. twm, fvwm, cwm
Then people decided to do whatever Microsoft and IBM did. And now we're stuck, as everyone has learnt to use ^A to select all text instead of use ^A to go send your cursor to the beginning of a line.
And how could you possibly use ^T to transpose two characters if it opens a new tab in your browser?

Do you have a image of your shutdown and browser icons? Because I'm pretty sure you're retarded.

>have samshit phone
>"muh material design!"
>chrome is just flat colors
>shutdown, reboot, etc are just flat colors
And no, I can't take a screenshot of the power menu.

Skeumorphism was a mistake, flat design is way better, ideally it shouldn't be throttled.

>The problem with skeumorphism these days is that there's no "object" for them to represent. What would be the icon for a music player? A hi-fi? A CD?
How about a music note, just like the music app on iOS 6 had. A browser? How about an image of the Earth, since it's connecting you to a world wide network of computers. A news reader? Newspapers are still a thing in most places unless you're a literal basement dweller.

So the designers of the GNOME project are shit, the main thing about UX and UI design is getting feedback from the final user (the average loonix tard)

That's not problem of the fucking flat design, that's the retardation of Samsung

Sauce boss

openbsd comes with cwm, twm, and fvwm

This is why the BSDs are better, clear hierarchical and monolithic design

install KDE

i fucking love you

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>just to clone Windows

Everybody ripped off Xerox and went from there.

Any modern gui desktop for linux is infinitely better than modern apple and windows, except maybe gnome. So i dont know what your issue is.

Maybe what looks good to someone does not look good to someone because AESTHETUCS ARE SUBJECTIVE,
FUCKTARDS

Now standardization, everyone applying the same UI standards including such things like jeyboard shortcuts, thats desiderable and not subjective.

>Any modern gui desktop for linux is infinitely better than modern apple and windows, except maybe gnome.
so, kde?

There's no real difference between those.

the Windows UI is pretty nice
MS did a bunch of design work for Windows 95 (also, they copied the living shit out of Apple's System 7, but they actually did spend time and money testing what worked and what didn't, and apart from shit like aliases being a fuckton better than Windows shortcuts, 95's UI is probably nicer to use overall)

was pretty much the last time they spent that much effort on providing a good UI (98 backpedals on a few good decisions in favor of trying to make the desktop resemble the internet, and each later version does some changes that never got the focus testing they needed), and despite Windows 10 doing all it can to bury classic Windows design, that design work done for 95 still remains in part
and it's still good where it remains relatively untouched

and as an aside, KDE has always copied Windows pretty hard, it's not like this is a new thing
I also distinctly remember no one actually liking CDE back in the day. I thought it was ugly shit (it's grown on me nowadays) that was kinda awkward.

That's flat out bullshit.

>Freetard GUIs suck shit because there's a bunch of competing toolkits and frameworks.
this has always reeked of bullshit to me
a bunch of the software I use on Windows just ignores the standard Windows controls and draws its own (DAW, 3D modeler, text editor, browser, antivirus, etc), everyone wants to stand out instead of just being another "boring program"
even Microsoft's own shit like Office doesn't bother with native controls (and hasn't since like Word 95)
it's not the competing toolkits

I'd say the answer is really programmer-centered design. As in, the dev slapped together a UI, spent time working on the program a bunch, got used to whatever shit layout it had, and no longer can see the flaws. GIMP's probably one of the clearest examples of this issue.
No one really sat down and thought about how they'd lay out their interfaces for other people to use.
Even if they did, they're probably still not visual designers, and the term "programmer art" applies in full force.
Generic free software shit or closed source single-dev programs have generally poor UIs everywhere, and damn fucking near every in-house or extremely niche piece of commercial software I've seen has had a UI so fucking awfully laid out that it makes fucking Blender look like a marvel of intuitive UI design.

>WindowMaker does look really nice.
WindowMaker is a real treat.
it's light as shit, but full of features
it's extremely comfortable to use and looks clean

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GNOME has gotten a lot better since early 3.0 releases but still every now and then has this kind of fuckery, why are there two identical settings buttons next to each other

>GIMP's probably one of the clearest examples of this issue.
i don't understand why people complain about this all the time, gimp ui is basically a copy of photoshop with a bigger box for tool options, how the fuck does that suggest to you that it was any more "programmer-centered design" than photoshop

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>two identical settings buttons next to each other
That's a bug in whatever application that is. Report it, faggot.

GIMP's UI is superficially similar (as a lot of drawing programs are). In actual use, you end up doing several more actions in GIMP to get results vs in Photoshop, which directly affects your workflow.

the low hanging fruit example of this is that there's a bunch of ways to draw a circle, none of which are as simple as in Photoshop (shit, GIMP had a really fucking awful plugin that shipped with it, Gfig, just for drawing shapes and shit, all with its own really, really, REALLY half-assed UI entirely separate from GIMP's that's missing basic shit like stroke thickness)

you do know that you're posting a print of a DE that's a nextstep clone, right?

>it's a shame the NeXT-style UIs died out
It's one of the saddest things in the tech world to me. I would really love to see a more modern take on NeXTSTEP's design, but no one out there wants to do it.

openbox.org/wiki/Main_Page
archlabslinux.com/
bunsenlabs.org/
I have nothing to complain about desu

I think the issue undermining a lot of FOSS software is that it's designed for people already on board and the default assumption when you raise issues tends to be that you're the problem. You didn't learn the backwards-ass way this program works. You didn't spend long enough researching online how to use this OS before trying to actually do what you need to with it.
It couldn't possibly be that something works in a counter-intuitive fashion or this UI is terribly laid out. I've gotten used to eating this flavour of shit for ten years and I've done fine so you should too.

The modern Mac OS UI evolved from NeXTSTEP. Aqua is the modern take on NeXT-style UI, unless you just want the NeXT UI with different colors.

What do you want? If you stray too far from traditional UI designs then people bitch about not knowing how to use it, but if you follow traditional UI designs then people like you bitch about cloning other OS's.

tis actually a bug in the elementary skin

>hurr gimp can't draw a circle
again you just repeat a meme about how some feature you want is missing and can't give any actual reasons why the design is flawed

>you end up doing several more actions in GIMP to get results vs in Photoshop, which directly affects your workflow
this statement is absolutely meaningless in any context because everyone's workflow is different

mac os 9 was the pinnacle of UI design desu
i wish os x was that elegant. Windows 2000 close second.

FPBP. "Bazaar" design never comes up with good software. For that, you need the cathedral model, with a someone with vision leading them.

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Most people involved in developing it are coders. You need UI people, designers, etc to build something new. You also need focus groups, user testing and other tools so you can iterate.

Freetards tend to want to do things their own way even if it’s only marginally different. That’s why there’s a million unnecessary distros that try to reinvent the wheel. If they would have put that time into perfecting a couple distros instead, desktop linux could be going somewhere.

>MUH DESIGN AND UI I NEED IT TO LOOK MINIMAL AND AESTHETIC ITS NOT LIKE I USE MY COMPUTER :((((((

>minimal and aesthetic
This doesnt get in the way of using the computer at all. Most people add shortcuts to literally every program on their computer, increasing productivity a lot more than if it was designed like windows or macos.

*keyboard shortcuts, not desktop ones.

Visual design does need to conform to one vision, which is one reason. This can be done in the bazaar model, but it leads to difficulty in maintenance and many competitors... Which isn't a bad thing. There are two bigger issues.
1. Linux inherited tools and culture from Unix. The command line is superior for experienced users that have the capability to craft the OS. This leads to deemphasizing the GUI, since if it's ugly, weak, or cluttered the experienced user just opens a term and gets to work anyway. Your average Linux girl(male) isn't going to write or improve software that they don't need or care about, and often that's the GUI, so it gets neglected. Which is only a bad thing if you want babbies to want and be able to use it.
2. For a myriad of reasons, mostly people making their own cathedrals amongst the bazaar, there hasn't been the same encapsulation, automation, and developmental simplification with GUIs that there has been in other parts of the environment. If making a new UI was as simple as making a webpage or login script, there would be a lot more innovation and simplification than we've seen I think.

>this has always reeked of bullshit to me
>a bunch of the software I use on Windows just ignores the standard Windows controls
Just because the guy across the street cheats on his wife doesn't mean you should do it too. I agree with what you're saying about small projects or single pieces of software having a terrible UI design regardless of platform. I just think that Linux distros should strive for something better.

This. I often use GTK+ on my applications because it seems to be the standard for most Linux users and it's more portable. But I always try to make the UI as intuitive as possible. The way I see it is that if you've used a computer before, you should be able to figure out my program within 5 minutes.

>The modern Mac OS UI evolved from NeXTSTEP
>Aqua is the modern take on NeXT-style UI
Not really, no. The desktop shell and Finder are completely different and all of the applications have changed drastically. There's nothing left of NeXTSTEP aside from some of the APIs and underlying UI elements, which aren't really visible on the surface.

You're the reason why we have bad software.

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>girl(male)
Absolutely disgusting. I was going to offer a constructive and well thought out reply until I saw this horse shit. Leave Jow Forums and do not return.

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Bazaar model works fine, as long as it's a Sicilian bazaar with a Mafioso like head that every drifter merchant has to pay their respects to and follow their rules.

It's got the structure and vision of the cathedral but the all the other benefits of the bazaar.

If you can think of a 2D graphical interface for an OS that doesn't involve some sort of windowing, I'm sure everyone would love to hear it. Tiling windows are still windows, btw.

It would be a cool idea, but bad for multitasking... Something like web UI

Pretty sure it's from a comic book cover by Joe Chiodo. Not sure which one.

>design never comes up with good software
The bazaar does come up with good software and it comes up with original software, but doesn't come up with good original software. The bazaar works best when it has a spec or a product to clone.

instagram.com/p/0fwMURJntY

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Ah yes a fellow windowmaker user. Been using it on various distros for almost a decade. Loved it when I was 15 and love it now.

there's nothing wrong with pretty much any modern mainstream DE: kde, gnome, windows de, macOS de, xfce, e17, budgie

You guys just like to shit on everything that as a subjective degree of freedom

Install GNUStep

They don't even succeed in cloning Windows, lmao.

kde is buggy as shit and can be borderline unusable at times, gnome keeps gimping the fuck out of everything and apologists will say 'just tweak it! just use an addon' but then gnome devs keep breaking the fucking api so that addons won't work past a minor update, xfce's compositor is broken as shit and a frequent source of frustration to new xfce users is screen tearing - it's also old as shit and basically has no development

there's nothing strictly wrong with either of these 3 DEs but they're objectively inferior to macos or windows and that's even ignoring the complete lack of integration or consistency between gtk and qt
t. i3 user

I never ever experienced any of that. Tried kde, xfce. I don't care about gnome API, i was talking about appereance and usability, and none of those de have serious problem

GTK+ when you want portability? Qt is a lot more portable, especially when considering BSDs.

>KDE has been a cheap imitation of Windows for years now. Nice try, Pajeet.
Fixed.
Windows, of course, was a botched copy of MacOS Classic. MacOS was a developement of the Xerox desktop.

Cause Windows would just steal it and say it's theirs or anyone with a mind to try a cash-grab.