I reckon a lot of the people clamoring for these things are gen z or younger first discovering the idea of customizable OS's and are now going through all the awful decisions that were made before. Pretty sure I've seen a version of this skeuomorphic desktop like 15 times at this point.
The children yearn for Microsoft Bob - which took this idea a bit further:
"Microsoft Bob presented screens showing a house, with rooms that the user could visit containing familiar objects corresponding to computer applications, such as a desk with pen and paper and a checkbook. Clicking on the pen and paper would open the system's word processor."
Some level of skeuomorphic design is quite nice, like what we saw from Apple during the Forstall era. It seemed to strike a good balance.
Something like Microsoft BOB takes the metaphor too far and gets weird.
I think this project leans on it a little too hard, but a balanced approach can make the systems quite charming and provide a nice juxtaposition to the very austere hardware we have these days.
That might be the thing. In real life you don't use the same stationary for years. Your desk is a reflection of your mood and evolves almost daily. Maybe that's where these fail?
> In real life you don't use the same stationary for years.
That's honestly just because I can't reuse paper I've already written something on. That's a limitation of paper I'm glad the digital did away with.
I've used some pens for years. Once I found one I liked, I stuck with it.
I switched to Linux to get away from the UI churn. Things changing without my consent does not bring me joy, but it's not like you really have a choice if you run Windows (or a distro with a DE that does do the churn).
I functionally do use the same stationary for years. The only exception is paper, which I try to avoid using due to its real world limitaions. My desk doesn't change depending on my mood. It barely develops yearly, let alone daily.
Man, first Felix Reiseberg[0], then OpenCode 2.0[1], and now this in the last 24 hrs. Really giving off heavy Myst vibes. They are briefly interesting encounters, buy I deeply hope this isn't a legitimate UI trend.
It's hardly even skeuomorphism, it's a almost digital twin with rendered with Phong.
Yes! Please bring back the soul we had with retro OS GUIs (and the speed)... it's time for a resurgence. Especially with new systems/RAM/GPUs/etc. not being a thing for quite a while for a lot of people now.
the "paper windows" idea doesn't seem to have been done with as much soul as the rest of the ui. Just a turned up corner. I reckon something done there could really tie this togetjer
Fantastic. Giving me memories of MS Bob. Put a talking animal assistant in the corner and you’ve got it. Oh, and you could connect the assistant to an LLM of course.
This is neat, it’s not for me (I prefer extreme minimalism) but I could see how some would prefer it. I like how we’re getting more desktop options now thanks to wlroots.
I want more stuff like this. The era 20 years ago (e.g. Enlightenment) was way more fun than the bland monotonic design we have these days. If you like bland modern design, great, that should be an option as well, but we should still have good variety.
I look back at my Enlightenment desktop with joy. I guess many people hated all the tinkering with drivers & settings etc, but I loved it. Spending a few weekends getting a computer running with Linux and Enlightenment exactly like I wanted it to and then actually using that as my main driver for years are very nice memories.
> Spending a few weekends getting a computer running with Linux and Enlightenment exactly like I wanted it to and then actually using that as my main driver for years are very nice memories.
Years? The novelty wore off in a week with Enlightenment's constant crashing :-(
Anyway, I look forward to more Window Managers (Hell, even a whole DE) that put the fun and whimsy back into computing.
I used to use e17 on my daily driver phone. Illume was a nice UI, but you (or your distro) did have to find a good revision to not have it crash indeed :)
My distro was Slackware, prior to any sort of package management, so, yeah, things would crash, but IIRC, Enlightenment, as much as I loved the use, look and feel, just crashed way too often.
I don't know why anybody would. It takes all the lessons we learned about UX from user testing in the late 90s/early 00s and throws it all away to produce something that looks "clean" and "sleek", at the cost of being useful. Discoverability? Who needs it?
EDIT: Though I do enjoy skeuomorphism, I do think the TFA goes a bit too far.
Re: too far - it’s interesting, because there’s two reasons skeumorphism “works” - one is because it provides visual cues for how a virtual object will behave when acted upon, which lets our brain build a quick intuitive understanding of how to interact with a foreign object that draws on all our experience outside the computer, and two is because the visual mimicry of the physical object gives our brains immediate cues to understand what it’s seeing and build that interaction model.
This one absolutely over indexes on that second principle, to a borderline cartoonish degree, but I expect the reason it’s resonating so hard is exactly what you’re indicating, that in the industry’s desire to be able to move on from the tether to the shapes of physical objects, they discarded that first principle entirely, instead of figuring out how to maintain the visual cues to form and operation in a new language.
(Here’s where I throw away all that credibility I just got from the prior two paragraphs: I actually think Liquid Glass is getting closer to a “skeumorphism without skeumorphism” than anything else I’ve seen out there.)
Well, there's really two things going on here: consumer vs professional. Does an electrician need to "discover" the modes on her multimeter? Naw. Do I need to discover where the wiper controls are on the car I just rented? Absolutely! But I'm not a huge fan of UI fluff that helps me discover things on my work machine.
Weirdly, there is some kind of power play happening with OS UI: "MBA finally in position of influence wants to force their taste on everybody" appears to be a thing.
Your rental car comment reminds me of the time I looked like an idiot trying to open the fuel door on a rented Kia K5 for almost 20 minutes. I don't have a smartphone and didn't have my laptop so had no way to look anything up. Ended up finding this video on the gas station employee's phone (she came out to see if everything was okay. It was not okay.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_e7lZmbjtNo
If you have to release a tutorial video to open your fuel filler door, and that video includes the one easy piece of user interface to do the thing getting thanos-snapped out of existence, I think you did something wrong.
The cause of my problem was I opened the driver's door before turning off the car. The rental didn't have push-to-start like my personal vehicle, and I don't have "turn and remove key" on the mind when exiting a vehicle. Even locking and unlocking the door didn't unlock the fuel door, I had to turn the car back on, lock the doors, turn the car off, then unlock the doors. Why is opening the fuel door so complicated? There doesn't seem to be any way to do it mechanically, so good luck when the solenoid dies.
All the multimeters I've seen had pretty bog standard markings for AC and DC resistance, voltage and current. While not an electrician myself, I think one would be pretty annoyed if a "designer" invented new graphics for alternating current or resistance. They might even gotten hurt or damaged some equipment.
So when consistent UX is applied, both a professional and amateur alike can learn and trust that what they learned carries over.
Well, yeah, but I wouldn't call a single "~V" UI label "discovery". Mine actually auto-switches between AC and DC, which fits better, I think. But it's still just a tiny part. If I try to measure the ohms of a rubber tire, I don't get a little Clippy character popping up to explain resistance to me.
Most "flat" designed modern apps fail miserably at discovery. Most hide things in hamburger menus or require weird random swipes in odd directions with zero visual indicators.
I got bit by this recently. Brave on android has no "forward button in the app menu, it only has back. Chrome has both forward and back in the menu. Both browsers support swiping from the right side to go forward in the history stack (although this seems to be overloaded with switching tabs in a tab group), which I discovered by accident. What's odd about this though is that the device has a global back button that is also used for backward history navigation, but that's been duplicated in brave with an additional back action in the menu, but the forward history navigation is entirely hidden and has only one way to invoke it: via swiping.
Modern design is not synonymous to dis-empowering design.
FWIW I love modern design, and I have all these too clever skeuomorphs. Modern design is honest to the digital medium. I find its beauty lies, not in the quirky ways it tries to mimic real textures and objects, but by how it provides usable controls and information by applying basic design elements like spacing, alignment, color, typography, discovery, layered info density, etc. well.
None of these requires skeuomorphs. It is like the difference between thinking a website is visually impressive and stunning because it uses a nice background image. That would not impress me. What would impress me are stuff like: does it have an effective information architecture, as reflected in it main menu and general link structure? Does it use a tasteful and usable color scheme? Does it have an interesting and still usable visual grouping? Etc.
I fully agree with this take. I don't think of a monitor / desktop as a tool that I interact with like I would a hammer; there is nothing intuitive about "open this high-definition representation of a day planner by clicking a button with your thumb on this little round plastic box somewhere else." I simply do not understand the appeal of skeumorphism, frankly I think these things look tacky but that is just my preference.
My interactions are with content, generally as strings of text but often as picture/video/audio. I prefer that my 'desktop' apply the principles you've mentioned, to the problem of tastefully and comfortably arranging, displaying, and manipulating that content, and little else. Some types of controls that lean skeuomorphic, like sliders or switches, may be useful and even intuitive in that endeavor; others, like an analog knob or dial, aren't. If I want to watch a video, display it in a minimal, tasteful frame; I do not need a representation of an old 1970s wooden TV or something.
Do all those toggle switches and dials and sliders actually help discovery for people who grew up with iPads? Maybe their function is only obvious to us dinosaurs.
It wouldn't be so important if things didn't change so much over the years. The CLI has stayed fairly consistent over the past 40 or so years. Can't say the same about GUI, though.
I wouldn't have to rediscover all functionality if designers didn't shuffle things around for no reason. Though, that's mostly a Windows thing, which I have to use for work.
These lessons made sense for users born before personal computers, but it's debatable if these lessons are transferable to so called "digital native" users.
I think it depends on audience. I think there is a place for the 'Microsoft Bob' s of the world. My 90+ year old grandma would probably use a computer if we sanded down all the hard edges and kept her in a box (computationally speaking). Hell my 70+ year old mother, even though she's had a computer for 35ish years prefers her ipad for just that reason (simpler than her hand-me-down macbooks i keep her supplied with).
The UX disaster is not just about looking "clean" and "sleek". It is all about mobile. The choice between bland colored boxes, skeuomorphism and other styles is just looks, it doesn't change the fundamentals.
Here is the problem: smartphones have a small screens and are operated using fat fingers, so you need big buttons and you don't have much space, so you are very limited in the amount of stuff you can put on screen. It also means there is a lot of hidden stuff.
Now that having a mobile app, or a mobile optimized website is often a requirement, the desktop app usually follows the mobile conventions, which is not great, but better than doing it the other way. Having two entirely different apps to make the best use of the platform is possible, but it is expensive, and you want to maintain some level of consistency, so that users switching between desktop and mobile won't be lost. You probably want to maintain branding too.
To me, it is not that designers don't know how to do good UX like they did in the 90s/00s, it is that there are contradictory requirements and they have to make compromises.
a single color QT/mosaic interface is the definition of bland jurassic park UI and it's refreshing to use every after getting stuck dealing with modern machines and interfaces.
Is it just a default theme difference, or is the current version actually less themable?
Also, the person you replied to mentioned Moksha; that's a fork of Enlightenment 17 (which is what at least two of your cool-looking example screenshots appear to be from).
As someone who runs a super-boring, stock tiler with zero decoration or bling; couldn't agree more. It's this kind of thing that gets new users interested in Linux. _I_ started using Linux because I saw some video of wobbly windows, and desktops on a giant rotating cube.
I installed Debian with KDE on a couple of non-techy relatives' mid-range laptops around Covid, and in spite of KDE being notorious for its abundance of features, neither of those relatives have ever complained about slowness or lag. That era seems far in the past now.
Kinda same, I want there to be something reasonable that 99% of people can agree on. It shouldn't be that hard. Things seemed fine back with Gnome2, then, everything changed when the
Call me insane but I still think xfce and Enlightenment should do a fusion become one project. Get rid of the GNOME shenanigans on GTK and rewrite all xfce apps and stuff in the e libraries.
I feel like that was simply a limitation of the hardware at the time. Given modern hardware, I'm willing to bet that people of the 2000s would have made wild stuff.
Totally. Using Windows Vista Ultimate just for using Windows DreamScene ( e.g playing a video as a desktop background). Totally dumb, totally destroyed performance, totally cool :D
This is so terribly and unthinkingly done. What calculator looks like a paper notebook in real life? If you want to list apps, what's the appropriate metaphor? The designer thought "Oh, let's make it a list on paper in a notebook...". Why not e.g a toolchest with all the tools available to represent all the programs you have installed? (If you ask me to brainstorm an idea)
In Brett Victor's 2011 essay, "A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design", he laid out the foundation for his critique of skeuomorphic design. He believes hands are our future.
On the visual pretense: "Pictures Under Glass sacrifice all the tactile richness of working with our hands, offering instead a hokey visual facade."
On touchscreens mimicking real objects without haptics: "Pictures Under Glass is an interaction paradigm of permanent numbness. It's a Novocaine drip to the wrist. It denies our hands what they do best."
On why this design path is short-sighted: "To me, claiming that Pictures Under Glass is the future of interaction is like claiming that black-and-white is the future of photography. It's obviously a transitional technology. And the sooner we transition, the better."
Skeuomorphic design was a solution to teaching the customer how to use the digital product, but I wish we have more of its side effects like shadows, icons that pop and other things that are pleasant for the eye and depth.
I don't know if it's just because it was better or am I just tired of the current white (like #FFFFFF white) backgrounds with everything flat and not connected. I would like my browser tabs to be in the shape of a physical tab in notebooks.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 15.1 ms ] threadFun, but most themes were basically unusable.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaleidoscope_(software)
Some samples: https://web.archive.org/web/20110709175639fw_/http://www.kal...
(The one I used the most, was Ozymandias II).
"Microsoft Bob presented screens showing a house, with rooms that the user could visit containing familiar objects corresponding to computer applications, such as a desk with pen and paper and a checkbook. Clicking on the pen and paper would open the system's word processor."
Something like Microsoft BOB takes the metaphor too far and gets weird.
I think this project leans on it a little too hard, but a balanced approach can make the systems quite charming and provide a nice juxtaposition to the very austere hardware we have these days.
That may have more to with the skills of the implementors, as opposed to the concept, as a whole.
I do find modern "flat" design to be less "fun," but I get a lot more done with it.
That's honestly just because I can't reuse paper I've already written something on. That's a limitation of paper I'm glad the digital did away with.
I've used some pens for years. Once I found one I liked, I stuck with it.
I switched to Linux to get away from the UI churn. Things changing without my consent does not bring me joy, but it's not like you really have a choice if you run Windows (or a distro with a DE that does do the churn).
It's hardly even skeuomorphism, it's a almost digital twin with rendered with Phong.
[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50082470
[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50094994
Compaq Presario 486 1994, I was 10.
And yes, played Myst on it.
Tempus fugit…
One of my first contacts with a GUI. Windows 3.1 was the default, and soon Windows 95 was the "better" desktop.
But looking back, TabWorks was pretty cool and useful.
Years? The novelty wore off in a week with Enlightenment's constant crashing :-(
Anyway, I look forward to more Window Managers (Hell, even a whole DE) that put the fun and whimsy back into computing.
I don't know why anybody would. It takes all the lessons we learned about UX from user testing in the late 90s/early 00s and throws it all away to produce something that looks "clean" and "sleek", at the cost of being useful. Discoverability? Who needs it?
EDIT: Though I do enjoy skeuomorphism, I do think the TFA goes a bit too far.
This one absolutely over indexes on that second principle, to a borderline cartoonish degree, but I expect the reason it’s resonating so hard is exactly what you’re indicating, that in the industry’s desire to be able to move on from the tether to the shapes of physical objects, they discarded that first principle entirely, instead of figuring out how to maintain the visual cues to form and operation in a new language.
(Here’s where I throw away all that credibility I just got from the prior two paragraphs: I actually think Liquid Glass is getting closer to a “skeumorphism without skeumorphism” than anything else I’ve seen out there.)
Well, there's really two things going on here: consumer vs professional. Does an electrician need to "discover" the modes on her multimeter? Naw. Do I need to discover where the wiper controls are on the car I just rented? Absolutely! But I'm not a huge fan of UI fluff that helps me discover things on my work machine.
Weirdly, there is some kind of power play happening with OS UI: "MBA finally in position of influence wants to force their taste on everybody" appears to be a thing.
If you have to release a tutorial video to open your fuel filler door, and that video includes the one easy piece of user interface to do the thing getting thanos-snapped out of existence, I think you did something wrong.
The cause of my problem was I opened the driver's door before turning off the car. The rental didn't have push-to-start like my personal vehicle, and I don't have "turn and remove key" on the mind when exiting a vehicle. Even locking and unlocking the door didn't unlock the fuel door, I had to turn the car back on, lock the doors, turn the car off, then unlock the doors. Why is opening the fuel door so complicated? There doesn't seem to be any way to do it mechanically, so good luck when the solenoid dies.
Plenty of cars have automatic fuel door locks that work seamlessly.
https://embertonimperial.com/products/stc4072-locking-fuel-f...
So when consistent UX is applied, both a professional and amateur alike can learn and trust that what they learned carries over.
Well, yeah, but I wouldn't call a single "~V" UI label "discovery". Mine actually auto-switches between AC and DC, which fits better, I think. But it's still just a tiny part. If I try to measure the ohms of a rubber tire, I don't get a little Clippy character popping up to explain resistance to me.
Most "flat" designed modern apps fail miserably at discovery. Most hide things in hamburger menus or require weird random swipes in odd directions with zero visual indicators.
FWIW I love modern design, and I have all these too clever skeuomorphs. Modern design is honest to the digital medium. I find its beauty lies, not in the quirky ways it tries to mimic real textures and objects, but by how it provides usable controls and information by applying basic design elements like spacing, alignment, color, typography, discovery, layered info density, etc. well.
None of these requires skeuomorphs. It is like the difference between thinking a website is visually impressive and stunning because it uses a nice background image. That would not impress me. What would impress me are stuff like: does it have an effective information architecture, as reflected in it main menu and general link structure? Does it use a tasteful and usable color scheme? Does it have an interesting and still usable visual grouping? Etc.
My interactions are with content, generally as strings of text but often as picture/video/audio. I prefer that my 'desktop' apply the principles you've mentioned, to the problem of tastefully and comfortably arranging, displaying, and manipulating that content, and little else. Some types of controls that lean skeuomorphic, like sliders or switches, may be useful and even intuitive in that endeavor; others, like an analog knob or dial, aren't. If I want to watch a video, display it in a minimal, tasteful frame; I do not need a representation of an old 1970s wooden TV or something.
It wouldn't be so important if things didn't change so much over the years. The CLI has stayed fairly consistent over the past 40 or so years. Can't say the same about GUI, though.
I wouldn't have to rediscover all functionality if designers didn't shuffle things around for no reason. Though, that's mostly a Windows thing, which I have to use for work.
Here is the problem: smartphones have a small screens and are operated using fat fingers, so you need big buttons and you don't have much space, so you are very limited in the amount of stuff you can put on screen. It also means there is a lot of hidden stuff.
Now that having a mobile app, or a mobile optimized website is often a requirement, the desktop app usually follows the mobile conventions, which is not great, but better than doing it the other way. Having two entirely different apps to make the best use of the platform is possible, but it is expensive, and you want to maintain some level of consistency, so that users switching between desktop and mobile won't be lost. You probably want to maintain branding too.
To me, it is not that designers don't know how to do good UX like they did in the 90s/00s, it is that there are contradictory requirements and they have to make compromises.
Enlightenment today (https://www.enlightenment.org/_media/aa/shot-2021-12-13_17-4...) looks nowhere nearly as cool as it used to:
https://imgur.com/enlightenment-are-we-posting-throwbacks-de...
http://robert.thegeakes.co.uk/images/elive.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:E17_screenshot.jpg
https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/fq4y3c/e17_found_...
Also, the person you replied to mentioned Moksha; that's a fork of Enlightenment 17 (which is what at least two of your cool-looking example screenshots appear to be from).
https://github.com/schneegans/burn-my-windows
https://linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php
Cinnamon (comes with Linux Mint) is a modern refresh that's very functional and not at all heavy or slow.
If you don't want a desktop, I guess there are many good WMs to choose from.
That's the main thing we lost, isn't it? Options. I remember playing with so many different themes back in the day.
> The room is ray-traced
imho, part of the charm of iOS6 was that everything was baked into native-resolution textures.
I don't hate skeuomorphic design but come on man
The calculator is a sheet of paper..
This makes it interesting. I may try it out. Moksha uses 200 MB to 300 MB of RAM
https://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDes...
On the visual pretense: "Pictures Under Glass sacrifice all the tactile richness of working with our hands, offering instead a hokey visual facade."
On touchscreens mimicking real objects without haptics: "Pictures Under Glass is an interaction paradigm of permanent numbness. It's a Novocaine drip to the wrist. It denies our hands what they do best."
On why this design path is short-sighted: "To me, claiming that Pictures Under Glass is the future of interaction is like claiming that black-and-white is the future of photography. It's obviously a transitional technology. And the sooner we transition, the better."
(Bonus points for not throwing AI-tells at everyone in the README - much appreciated).
I don't know if it's just because it was better or am I just tired of the current white (like #FFFFFF white) backgrounds with everything flat and not connected. I would like my browser tabs to be in the shape of a physical tab in notebooks.
I don't know if this is accurate, but I blame Windows 8 and, especially, Windows 10 for popularizing this extremely bland and boring design.