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567 points elvis70 | 5 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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metadat ◴[] No.43525239[source]
This looks nice and easy to use.

My hypothesis is today's "modern" OS user interfaces are objectively worse from a usability perspective, obfuscating key functionality behind layers of confusing menus.

It reminds me of these "OS popularity since the 70s" time lapse views:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=cTKhqtll5cQ

The dominance of Windows is crazy, even today, Mac desktops and laptops are comparatively niche

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hi_hi ◴[] No.43527132[source]
As a kid, the OS's supported me in learning. They were simple, intuitive and rewarding. I'd click around and explore, and discover cool things like a Wheezer music video, or engaging puzzle games.

There was no one who could help me when I got stuck, beyond maybe an instruction manual. I just had to figure it out, mostly by trial and error. I learned so much, eventually being able to replace hardware, install and upgrade drivers, re-install the entire OS and partition the hard drive, figure out networking and filesystems. It built confidence.

Now my kid sits infront of an OS (Windows, Mac, it doesn't really matter) and there's so much noise. Things popping up, demanding attention. Scary looking warnings. So much choice. There's so many ways to do simple things. Actions buried deep within menus. They have no hope of building up a mental model or understanding how the OS connects them to the foundations of computing.

Even I'm mostly lost now if there's a problem. I need to search the internet, find a useful source, filter out the things that are similar to my problem but not the same. It isn't rewarding any more, it's frustrating. How is a young child meant to navigate that by themselves?

This looks like a step in the right direction. I look forward to testing it out.

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accrual ◴[] No.43527846[source]
> Things popping up

This is one of my biggest frustrations with modern GUI computing. It's especially bad with Windows and Office, but it happens on iOS and macOS too to an extent. Even though I've had Office installed for weeks I still get a "look over here at this new button!" pop-up while I'm in the middle of some Excel task. Pop-up here, pop-up there. It's insane the number of little bubbles and pop-ups and noise we experience in modern computing.

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1. askvictor ◴[] No.43528886{3}[source]
Even on gnome, I regularly have applications stealing focus when they decide they're the most important thing. As well as being really annoying, it's a security risk if an application steals focus while you're typing your password or otp key
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2. accrual ◴[] No.43530979[source]
> if an application steals focus while you're typing your password

Definitely. Bitwarden does this ironically. It will pop-up "UPDATE AVAILABLE!" half way through typing a passphrase. Why not suppress the pop-up if the user is typing, or make it non-modal? Every few days I am interrupted just trying to unlock a vault.

3. boudin ◴[] No.43531655[source]
Did you install an extension for that ? By default Gnome prevents this and shows a notification instead. It's extensions like Steal my focus that allows focus stealing
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4. askvictor ◴[] No.43544308[source]
I'm using PopOS, so there's a chance that it's related to that, but no I haven't. And I've tried the gsetting that supposedly helps prevent it. I've only ever seen Zoom and VSCode do this; I get the feeling that they don't quite follow the same conventions that 'native' Linux applications use, or use some trickery (as they see themselves as the most important thing on your computer).
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5. herbst ◴[] No.43554771{3}[source]
I never had anything steal the focus and was highly confused to read gnome here. I highly suspect PopOS is doing something weird theire. No matter how bad vscode is and integrates that never happened to me.