What is the future for G/UIs, and which design concept is currently the best?

Hah, I get it!

I like to call this the "vim" of UI design.

It's shit. Kill yourself (((designer))).

:^)

there's your answer

Terry Davis
Only bad thing about his GUI is the heavy use of function keys and emacs style chording (I'm more of a vi user). But at least those can be reconfigured.
And I don't like mice in general (or any interface that shackles you to them) but he at least seems to have key bindings for most stuff.
A lot of "modern" GUI and websites are just badly designed from a basic ergonomic POV. If it's not flexible enough to accomodate the user then it sucks.

This thing seems cyclical, even if a little more "modernized". One can only hope we end up like pic related, or 1995 all over again. Having UI as a field of "research" was a mistake.

Skeudo Practical is best

That's a gross interface. You're gross.

Because everyone claims it's minimalist but in practice it's inexcusably large?

Light and shadows are acceptable bloat.
In my personal programs I use what would be "practical" here.
I also got raised in the world of W95 boxes so I have some love for them

Hello, CIA nigger.

I don't mind Skeuo-Practical and Material-Bubble as long as they're not too bloated, and i don't really care about how the fuck buttons look like, how many functions the GUI has is more important.

Gross interfaces are a mark of autism I don't even know who you're talking about

ncurses everything

Sounds like your brain is all niggerlicious.

I have a job and I hate flat design.
Sorry to kill your fallacy.

What would you call Mint's new theme? It looks flat-ish, but doesn't go too far like Win8. So I guess it shows this kind of aesthetic can work if the developer has a modicum of talent.

It would be better if it was white text, dark background

Still too flat. I hate it how you can't really discern where the widgets start and end - it's all in one single sheet.

Just look at the cinnamon menu - there is no real separator between the category column and the application column. At the very least the main icons have their own rectangle boundary, but it's still weird.
Look at the strange unused empty space below the power icon - there's nothing in there.

It's still better than other shit modern UIs such as OS X, though.

Flat design is particularly insulting and inconvenient for people with visual impairments or situations where you're watching something from afar. You don't know what's a button and what's just a panel that has no action - there are no boundaries between icons to help you pinpoint in case of touchscreens. It's horrendous.

We've reached a point where computers have such high resources that we can use many colors and do kickass UIs but instead it's all flat ugly two color shit. And it's still slower and crappier than cluttery UIs such as composite Compiz or KDE3.5/4. The hell happened?

Also possible.

Not bad, but I'd still tweak it a bit if I was being autistic

Careful there, pal... "crappier than KDE" is a very serious insult.

Window controls should be in upper left corner, not upper right.

So you want it Mac-like? Look into Ubuntu. It even has the global menu bar on the top. It would be great, if its application launcher wasn't a baffling piece of shit! (Although it's possible to install a "classic menu indicator" applet.)

No, the proper place for anyone who isn't a homosexual is the upper right.

There's a reason for them to be on the left, to be on the same side as the menu.
And you seem to not understand even the basics of good UI design.

I already know about Ubuntu's Unity.
It has lots of defects, too, but it's the best UI among GNU/Linux DEs.

on the screenshot there's 1 obvious problem: partially applied "dark theme", it should be consistent, not like this.
AFAIK if you choose light theme, it looks less fucked.

There's a reason for them to be on the right, to be away from the menu. So you're not clicking it by accident.

And you seem to not understand even the basics of good UI design.

What's the deal with Canonical's obsession for the colors orange and purple? Not only are those some of the most obnoxious colors, they also don't fit with each other. It reminds me of the purple-phase Apple had with Leopard and Snow Leopard (10.6 and 10.7).

Peanut butter and jelly fetish

touch screens are not meant for productive tasks, only for consumption of media and games. poke and drool.

/rant

would be cool if "practical" became fashion again.

Fuck you, literally nobody likes flat design. Not even the plebs whom you claim to cater to.

Yeah! I too would much prefer to edit my images and video with text-only!
Its 2016, who doesent watch films in ascii?

This thread in a nutshell.

I don't understand the point of arguing about how buttons look like. Does it really matter?

"fucking garbage"

What do you consider flat design anyway?
I like the old Athena widgets a lot more than modern stuff, and it's pretty obvious what's a button and clickable, etc.
I don't play new games though. And actually the current Freeciv looks a lot worse in all respects. The old way was nicer, simpler, and less cluttered with useless noise. No fancy shit needed, just basic functionality.
The problem with modern interfaces is they try to look "professional" and in doing so end up ugly as shit, because that's what corporate shit is: ugly inside and out.

KDE 3.5 was actually good though. KDE with no bloat.

Windows 2000 was the peak of M$ UI. Skeuo-Practical forever.

by accident?
seriously?
if you have so much problems with mouse, better not use it at all

No, classic Mac OS had the best arrangement: the 'close' button is to the left, the 'zoom' and 'collapse' buttons to the right. This way, you would never close the window accidentally when you just wanted to resize or hide it.

(It's 'zoom' and not 'maximize' because maximizing didn't exist: the Mac could do drag-and-drop clippings, so you were always supposed to have some of the desktop visible. And 'collapse' because, rather than hide the window, it would reduce it to the title bar alone.)

I'm okay with that, and Practical. This whole "flat" shit pisses me off. Without borders separating shit, you can't tell where one element ends and another begins half the time.

I never thought of it that way, but now that I think about it, you are right, that is actually superior.

You fucks will complain about anything. I don't see a problem with the flat trend, if anything I like my interface not looking like plastic tubes coated in gloss varnish. I don't think I've ever had a single problem with not being able to tell clickable interface from static information. Most flat interfaces change color on hover, so if you make a mistake its only for .1 seconds. I understand disliking it for aesthetics, but arguing its hard to use is pretty pathetic. I'd really like an example of a hard to use flat interface (preferably a mainstream program, not some alpha build of an obscure FOSS program from a repository no one's ever used).

Mystery meat navigation, now infesting the whole system!

What the hell were you expecting when you came to Holla Forums?

people who keep making this shit need to be fucking shot, art fags ruin everything they touch

Unity is pretty ugly tbh.

Why not be able to see that it's clickable before hovering over it? That's as if you had to touch things in real life to know whether they are real or just painted. And good luck trying to hover over UI elements on a touchscreen.

That's assuming you don't have an menu in the Window and/or the "File" option is not directly below the close button. However in this specific case it is superior.

Menu on the left-Window options on the right is still superior if you have a Window menu.

Yes, I'm assuming those things because the Mac has a global menu bar. I love that.

You completely miss the point and obviously have no experience using technology to the fullest. A text console offers a much easier debugging experience than and batch processing is also a lot easier when you can go apply $current_color_correction_scheme photo1.jpg photo2.jpg photo3.jpg

Also,
No. No you aren't. We all know you're lying.

I've only ever met one person that like flat, and he's a raging hipster faggot that does nothing but browse reddit all day.

Litterally hate anything that isn't the first 2 and the 3rd is fun too.

I cannot fucking wait for this shit to go out of fashion. Whoever adopts these design practices should be euthanized.

feeding in variables like that triggers me so hard bash has for loops for a reason.

I hate that fucking arrow at the bottom

This thing

When using a loop you have to start a new process for every single file. It does not matter for a few files you type in by hand, but when you want to operate on hundreds of files you will appreciate being able to pipe to output of find to xargs and then pass it all to your program in one go.

It has for loops for a reason, and this is not that reason. For loops are for routines that can't handle lists of files natively. This routine (program) can, so there's no need to increase complexity by wrapping it in a loop.

mint is looking good nowadays. too heavy DE still, in my opinion, but good for low-tech users to migrate from windows, though chromebooks and android will probably always be more popular than mint.

yes good point on the exit button

Shameful, Holla Forums.

Android is more popular than Windows, so that's not a strong prediction to make.

I like flat tbh

green vomit

ubuntu's nigger-tier orange/purple theme is cancerous.

People are sheep. This "metro/flat/modern" theme will stick around for a while because any no-talent hack can easily replicate it.

theverge.com/2016/8/3/12325104/airbnb-aesthetic-global-minimalism-startup-gentrification

👌😻😭

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It's the logical evolution of the tablet.

Why do libreautists not understand how kerning or line height works?

Where do you see kerning?

But dark backgrounds clash with webpages and such.

Indeed, the content of the programs is usually light, so with dark interfaces there's too much contrast.

Kill yourself.

Linux niggershit.
wew

Are you blind or retarded?

How many rupees have you won so far, Rajesh?

That wasn't even supposed to be bash, I was just trying to offer a psuedo-language that would explain my point.

Point 1:
Not worth replying to

2:
That's just bad logic on multiple points. Not everyone has a very powerful machine with lots of storage and the programmer shouldn't assume that they do. Bloat also makes a bigger difference than you let on. That 5% average slowdown can be multiplied during low performance events and can add up over time, especially if you make money with your computer. There are also security and stability ramifications for bloat. In short, unnecessary code should be avoided.

3:
Chicken and egg. They've both taken from each other, though W10 looks and acts way too much like KDE 5. You also forget that Windows now comes with Ubuntu installed as well as the plethora of other Linux DEs that are nothing like windows.

4:

5:
At least we agree about something

6:
The movie predicted a legitimate concern with modern communication that was relevant to this thread

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I like flat and fully embrace it.

It'd be fine for consumer OS aimed at grandmas who buy the latest shit because it's shiny, but you yourself should know better than "shiny = good".
That association is killing actual tech.
Also, making assumptions on the hardware the software runs on is shit, and it's (one of) the reason(s) why we shit on systemd. Also, it's the engine that moves consumerism and the degradation of culture. Think about the way most modern developers kill retrocompatibility because "jesus user who uses a computer with less than 8 gigs of RAM? :^)". That way you are forced, if you want to keep doing what you were doing just fine before, to get a new machine to run the software, which hardware makers conveniently fill with botnet bullshit (that's shorthand for "they actually can control your computer remotely", not a meme). And forget about just updating the few relevant modules, as most stores don't sell them, and as you go into newer and newer equipment, they make it harder for modular upgrading. So if you code with bloat, you are the cog in the machine, and deserve to get purged.
I do agree that some assumptions on the hardware are okay, but user interface shouldn't be made for making the association above, it should be made for communicating with the user and just that. All the rest is just marketing.

But that's not minimalism.

This is very good, I'd use something like that today with multiple desktops. "Maximize" was such a mistake that discourages multiple tasks in the same workspace and may even encourage bad UI design practices.

I remember that video of Jobs showing off all the NeXT workstation OS and he talked about dragging and dropping a lot and how good the OS is at allowing programs to interoperate with each other.
youtube.com/watch?v=gveTy4EmNyk

Now every graphical program wants to handle every task inside one window by itself, no IPC, broad menus, big widgets, I don't like it.

designers reinvent the wheel over and over again to keep people entertained with recycled concepts and an artificial sense of progress

global menu bars are abominable

Holy crap. 24 years later, Nextstep is still far more advanced than Windows.

Decent points but the vast majority of consumer hardware is shitty and Chinese and built to fail in a few years no matter what's running over it.

I don't think I've ever once had a laptop that wasn't stupidly overpowered causing the poor air flow to brick the mb within a year or two.

It's not just software, there's really no interest whatsoever in selling sustainable hardware either.

Isn't Nextstep just macOS now?

Yeah, but I believe that's exactly why developers should support the barest minimum hardware: old hardware is still a choice. There's still a few years left before corrosion and destruction renders those inviable. And, considering it's the hardware for those who recognize the fact that modern hardware is made for being shit, if you're going to make a program for someone who knows his shit, better help him with his (smart) choice of hardware.
These last years have left me with the taste that slow hardware can still be great at most tasks, and modern hardware is, sadly, not all that it's cranked up to be. After all, many years ago people had less than tenths of the power we have today, and they did great stuff. People walked on the moon with just slide rulers, too.
Some of that should be reflexed in UI design: make it for people who know their shit, don't make it for marketing, or for showing the new, shiny stuff, and much less to force people to upgrade their machines if they want to run the latest version of your program. The same goes for the internals, not only GUI, make it be as efficient as you can.
I do agree, though, that modern computers should be treated as perishable. Modern everything is perishable by design, really. Never count on it to not get broken at the worst moment possible.
Really, one thinks that all this "backup your data" push is just a way to normalize the fact that computers get borked "just because :^)", and that it's common for shit to get broken when computers have been around for so long that there's no real excuse for it to happen. In the beggining I bought it, because computers were new and we still didn't know how to make it be robust, but nowadays you have no excuse, computers shouldn't fail that easily.

r8

Just you wait.

FUCKING THIS
tfw almost NO os has come close to what OS9 was in terms of UI and feel
all i want is a gnulinox or bsd os to look, feel, and SOUND exactly like os9.2
plus it had CRAZY amounts of customization

this is not a desktop thread, fuck off

in osx this is pretty much the most rice you can get, otherwise the default UI is kind of SHIT
it is a BIT better in the newer systems but still SHITTT
this is also only on lion, on the newer versions you cant do half the shit ive done to make this os look and feel better

Only good thing about osx is how it handles fullscreen applications, each fullscreen program gets its own workspace that can be seamlessly switched to and placed between other workspaces. The audio stack is also the best out there, but that is it.

Shiiiiiiit nigga, is that Kaleidoscope with the Nextstep theme? I remember using that back in the day. It was fun, but a third-party app doesn't count as "crazy amounts of customization".

Yes, OS X (to be renamed "macOS" for the next update) has the underpinnings of Nextstep and an interface that mixes some of old Mac OS and some new ideas.

HELLL YEAH BOIIIII

actually its not being done with kaleidoscope at all this is all done with the appearance control panel, you can get some really advanced themes.
nextstep icons are the best tho

I also recall using Drawing Board. Ever used the Gizmo and Hi-Tech themes?

drawing board looks cute

This. Most people like flat designs. They're simple to parse while not being gaudy or overdone.

Design is all about balancing information and what is pleasing to the eye.

I doubt "most people" notice or care about design, flat or otherwise. They just suck down what the industry jews shove in their mouth, like good little whores.
They don't know anything else either, because most haven't own computer for decades, or seen myriads of UI possibilities. They probably never run OS other than Windows, OS/X, or smartphone shits.
And so, they have no perspective. When all you ever saw in your life is one color, you don't even realize there are other choices and things that maybe you enjoy more. They'll never find those, and they'll never know.

That is ricing seriously gone wrong. The default UI is good, you are just sperging because you are obsessed with ricing the shit out of everything until it looks like an abomination.

So, material design = flat, or not necessary? Cause i find core principles of material design is a way to go.

Material Design works because Android always sets the active app to full screen. I don't think it works too well if you try to apply it to a normal deskop with multiple overlapping windows. Just look at Remix OS, it's interesting but somehow it's... not quite right.

they should grey out inactive window, that will fix it imo

Material was designed to look good on palm-sized screens that would be used under varying light conditions, from pitch darkness to glaring sunlight. The design is reminiscent of paper cards and you flip around through them, one at a time. This works well for a phone, but badly when on a desktop sized screen where you basically have a series multiple of control boards open at the same time.

Listen here, nigger.
Nobody likes having 10% of system resources wasted drawing an UI when it could be used for running applications. Especially when you can have a usable or even a good one for a small fraction of that.