Why "modern, up-to-date design decisions" tend to actually make computers lousier despite their being conceived of by people whose very job it is to make things better?
And especially, why do they tend to make open source GUIs especially shitty?
Well...
First, what's good and desirable about these "modern, up-to-date design decisions" UIs is that they are organized around a tightly integrated, sort-of-intuitive metaphors in theory, and even in UI Labratories, let the average person accomplish more things, and accomplish those thing more quickly. The Office ribbon is fine example. In order to let a person accomplish more while confusing them less(giving fewer choices), it must anticipate what the user does...
Anticipation... stop there, there's the first problem - anticipating the users intentions. It's not just that the anticipation can be just wrong from get-go (though that happens too). It's that anticipation is an approach in it's present incarnations scales very badly. As soon as you want to do something hard, the system will stop anticipating you and so the hard thing is twice as hard.
And problem two of tightly integrated metaphors is that since they inherently have to abstract from how a computers' software and hardware actually work, any task that's hard for the machine will suddenly have to be done in a fashion that takes into account the machines' limitations and so violates the metaphors - if your app takes up 10GB, it need a quit menu item, damn - but giving it that menu now puts it in conflict with the "UI guidelines".
And finally, the reason tightly-integrated metaphors are especially bad in Open Source is they require more consistency so the user can count on them (even from otherwise separate applications). And you'll have a hard time getting that with a horde of volunteers. IE, why KDE 4 was terrible.
Why "modern, up-to-date design decisions" tend to actually make computers lousier despite their being conceived of by people whose very job it is to make things better?
And especially, why do they tend to make open source GUIs especially shitty?
Well...
First, what's good and desirable about these "modern, up-to-date design decisions" UIs is that they are organized around a tightly integrated, sort-of-intuitive metaphors in theory, and even in UI Labratories, let the average person accomplish more things, and accomplish those thing more quickly. The Office ribbon is fine example. In order to let a person accomplish more while confusing them less(giving fewer choices), it must anticipate what the user does...
Anticipation... stop there, there's the first problem - anticipating the users intentions. It's not just that the anticipation can be just wrong from get-go (though that happens too). It's that anticipation is an approach in it's present incarnations scales very badly. As soon as you want to do something hard, the system will stop anticipating you and so the hard thing is twice as hard.
And problem two of tightly integrated metaphors is that since they inherently have to abstract from how a computers' software and hardware actually work, any task that's hard for the machine will suddenly have to be done in a fashion that takes into account the machines' limitations and so violates the metaphors - if your app takes up 10GB, it need a quit menu item, damn - but giving it that menu now puts it in conflict with the "UI guidelines".
And finally, the reason tightly-integrated metaphors are especially bad in Open Source is they require more consistency so the user can count on them (even from otherwise separate applications). And you'll have a hard time getting that with a horde of volunteers. IE, why KDE 4 was terrible.