libAdwaita is an attempt at providing a consistent framework for making GUI applications in Linux.
People commenting on MacOS UX often forget that people creating Mac GUI applications aren't magically better at doing UX than Linux users. It's orders of magnitude easier to make ok looking GUI applications on a mac.
Besides the fact that cocoa on mac has evolved over a decade(when linux people were busy constantly reinventing gtk themeing engines and display servers), cocoa had more books on building gui applications in ~2010 than the entire history of gtk and gnome together.
And while the gnome team is busy constantly tweaking small visual details, glib is still a nightmare to work with.
It's also full of ticks in places you'd think should be fixed by now. For over a decade selecting folders in gtk/gnome has been broken by design:
- open folder selection dialog
- click a folder by mistake without double clicking it
- clicking the select folder button now enters the folder instead of selecting the current folder
- there no way to unselect the selection. -> you have to enter the folder, then go a level up and then select the folder
Kirigami looks promising, but it doesn't look anywhere near production quality polish.
> - open folder selection dialog - click a folder by mistake without double clicking it - clicking the select folder button now enters the folder instead of selecting the current folder - there no way to unselect the selection. -> you have to enter the folder, then go a level up and then select the folder
Glad I'm not the only one with this problem, it's so frustrating and there's literally nothing you can do about it, you just gotta go up one level and come back down.
> Besides the fact that cocoa on mac has evolved over a decade
Arguably longer -- Cocoa itself goes back to NextStep in the mid-90s, and the Mac focus on UX goes back a decade before that.
But, I don't think it's just the books -- starting with the NextStep era, the tooling (Xcode and, before that, Interface Builder) was part of it, and the whole "follow the Human Interface Guidelines" ethos going back to the 68K Mac days genuinely created a culture of UI-obsessed nerds, not just inside Apple but in the whole third-party developer ecosystem, that I haven't seen anywhere else. While I genuinely don't think it's fair to say that open source developers don't care, they don't care at the same level that the Mac historically has, and you see that in all sorts of tiny little details that seem individually inconsequential -- like the "broken by design" folder selection you describe above -- but collectively add up.
Well, I'll back off the "haven't seen anywhere else" a bit; I met a couple folks working on Qt when I was at Nokia circa 2010, and they seemed to be that level of deeply involved opinionated UX nerd. (Which genuinely surprised me, I confess, because my impression of Qt before starting there was…maybe not the best?) But it's not something I saw carried through by third-party Qt developers outside Nokia/Trolltech.
One could make a good case that Apple's taken their eye off the ball in terms of UX over the last few years, making unforced form-over-function errors and biffing aesthetic details in ways one suspects they just wouldn't have a decade ago. Even so, there's a cohesion to the design that I don't generally feel on other platforms. I'm not convinced the "convergence" that the linked article described is the way to go to address this, either. (As others have pointed out, the apps Apple makes using their own "convergence-focused" toolkits like Catalyst have tended to be their wiggiest.)
Yes MacOS and Cocoa is just Nextstep. Not only are the classes called NSSomething, but there is a presentation from early 90ies of the dev environment by Steve Jobs and the Interface Builder etc look very similar to Xcode.
> People commenting on MacOS UX often forget that people creating Mac GUI applications aren't magically better at doing UX than Linux users.
It's not magic. It's attraction. Just like magnets. People who _care_ about UX are more likely to use a Mac than any Linux distro. Independently but related, those who use a Mac are far more likely to care about UX than the average Linux user.
I say that as someone who dremels their phone and earbuds to make them easier to use, yet still prefers a Debian desktop.
The argument isn't that one _could_ dremel Debian, in fact, after recently installing KDE on a new machine I'd argue that one _has to_ dremel it a bit to get a good UX. The argument is that the Mac - for all its flaws - has a better UX.
People who care about UX will gravitate towards the Mac. A subset of these folks start developing software, as a consequence, the people creating Mac GUIs do better UX than those using and developing for Linux.
Yeah, you see that's where I don't think it's "people who care about UX" who gravitate to Mac. Maybe 10 years ago, sure, when Apple font rendering was massively superior to anything else on the market and people would put up with endless crap with the corporate monster in order to not see ugly fonts. But these days, I'm not so sure.
The people who actually really care about UX want to dremel their stuff because the little tiny discrepencies annoy them (like you).
The people who flock to Mac these days are plain consumers. They want to be protected from the intricacies, have something that "looks good" without having to decide what "looking good" actually involves, or making any decisions about it. The average Mac user these days sees Apple as a brand that says something about their good taste.
and yes, I completely agree that you have to dremel your Linux install to get it looking good. But that's half the fun :)
> Besides the fact that cocoa on mac has evolved over a decade(when linux people were busy constantly reinventing gtk themeing engines and display servers)
I'll be the first one to concede that Wayland has been more or less a monumental waste of development effort, but can you point to the constant reinvention of themeing engines? Stylesheet modification has been a thing for decades now, there's very little that needed to be done to accomodate for them, at least from a GTK development standpoint (that I'm aware of).
A few minor critiques are in the wikipedia article[1].
Most of the ones I remember were theme developers dropping support for their themes during minor gtk3 releases. I remember seeing a lot of articles about this, but I wouldn't be able to point you to them now.
People commenting on MacOS UX often forget that people creating Mac GUI applications aren't magically better at doing UX than Linux users. It's orders of magnitude easier to make ok looking GUI applications on a mac.
Besides the fact that cocoa on mac has evolved over a decade(when linux people were busy constantly reinventing gtk themeing engines and display servers), cocoa had more books on building gui applications in ~2010 than the entire history of gtk and gnome together.
And while the gnome team is busy constantly tweaking small visual details, glib is still a nightmare to work with.
It's also full of ticks in places you'd think should be fixed by now. For over a decade selecting folders in gtk/gnome has been broken by design:
- open folder selection dialog
- click a folder by mistake without double clicking it
- clicking the select folder button now enters the folder instead of selecting the current folder
- there no way to unselect the selection. -> you have to enter the folder, then go a level up and then select the folder
Kirigami looks promising, but it doesn't look anywhere near production quality polish.