I think the problem Gnome, and Microsoft, have is they keep throwing money at designers. So designers keep making designs for the sake of designing. They should stop designing, stick to the design they already have and only do incremental updates when new widgets come out.
It's not like everything was perfect in the past and so we're done. Far from it.
Even beyond that, the world is changing. New needs, new expectations, new styles in design. Just like we wouldn't expect cars to be frozen in time in the 1950s, we shouldn't expect UI/UX to be either.
Linux DE's have never had a particularly well thought out, well designed look. There's been a lot of themes that people create to mimic other commercial systems out there, but not a lot of very high quality original work going on. Yet we can see plenty of good work technologically. For a long time when it was largely grey beards most people didn't mind so much, but now people expect good design across all products. The standards have risen, and the FOSS world should meet that challenge head on.
> Just like we wouldn't expect cars to be frozen in time in the 1950s, we shouldn't expect UI/UX to be either.
I think your example points to a peculiarity of UI/UX: cars have changed a lot since the 1950s, but their interface has remained surprisingly constant.
I think there is a point to be made that an interface can reach a point at which it cannot be improved, or at least not without a whole paradigm change.
But even that is not true. Windows are now mechanized, with child locks. The ways to open and lock doors is different, both in the car and from afar. The entire center console now is different, to the point where Tesla has just a touch screen on many models. There are cup holders, EVs have fruncks and often are largely driven using 1 pedal, side mirrors are adjustable with motorized buttons, seat placement is totally different and often a setting that can be memorized by the car, stick shifts and clutches are largely gone, the wheel inner shapes are different and often contain buttons, starting/stopping the car is usually a button, etc etc.
If you’re focused simply on the steering wheel itself that’s like saying there’s still a mouse and keyboard. Yes, that’s true — and even that will likely be disrupted over time. But everything else has changed.
To play a bit in this space, if you check out the settings panel in Ubuntu compared to, say, the Windows XP control panel, you'll see that Gnome's settings panel is more usable. Mainly on account of having a single entry point, and the search bar on the top.
I think a lot of this is influenced by modern MacOS and iOS settings management (much like, to my recollection, Gnome 2 settings panels were very influenced by how Windows was doing things). It's not like it's 100% better, but for my usage it's felt nicer.
There are also a lot more work in this idea that there are many different ways to get to a settings pane. That way it's easier for people to get to a thing even if they have different ideas of where it "should" be
The article is really about GTK3 versus GTK4, using the settings pane as an example. My comment is about the larger picture. However, take a look at what it meant to reset your default settings in 2010: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/08/restore-default-gnome-se...
Settings panes are still largely confusing on all platforms, commercial included, as you broaden your user base. They've also grown in utility as iOS has pushed the idea of a centralized place for settings for all aspects of the system (apps included), which you're starting to see elements of on other platforms as well. There's plenty of room for improvement, including simplifying everything down so that few settings can make big differences where the heavy lifting is done for you. Linux in particular suffers from this, from a legacy of a million .conf files everywhere that many people blindly copy-pasta'd random configurations they found online (I'm looking at you XFree86).
Why are designers so different from the rest of us I wonder? They value minimalism above all else, with little debate, but everyone else has a lot wider of a range of preferences it seems like.
I imagine that its a constant refinement between utility and minimising distraction. They end up skirting this fine line because they live the details, much like how anyone can be distracted or obsess over miniature details when you have hyperfocus on a subject.
