This is a really enjoyable take, pushing the feeling of what one does on a computer towards actually being at a desk and having to reach for various functions. I feel like that would enable spatial memory to do some cool things.
I miss the 90s chunkiness of switches, buttons, hardware: being able to hear the computer "think" (HDD seeks), the hum of a CRT. Modern machinery feels so insubstantial, emphasizing clean glass and tidy machined chassis. (chassies?)
I have this persistent daydream about a computer setup that feels like the Nostromo flight deck from Alien. I almost want to feel like I'm sitting _inside_ a computer when I'm at my desk, surrounded by powerful feeling electronics with substantial switches and such. Of course there's plenty of inconvenience there too, but something about it appeals to me.
Replace language with an actually sensible one, and press any key to continue!
If nothing else, that is a truly sadistic trivia question. I wonder if there are any other words in the English language whose plural form is spelled the same, but pronounced differently.
We just need to add more sound effects tied to system monitor probes to get those HDD noises back, kinda like how electric cars have that parking lot noise to make sure pedestrians are aware of them in lieu of an engine banging away!
Being inside the computer like being at a pipe organ console, or surrounded by screens like a hacker in a dystopian hovercraft!
My desktop is wired up using Ethernet over powerline (was easier than running a cable) and it creates some noise through my desktop speakers.
The issue is easily fixed with better grounding, but I’ve found that I prefer the noise. I can hear my network traffic, and I’ve come to use it as mental input. (“Op, I can hear that my script has reached the write-to-s3 step”)
it's got the right noises and i believe that they are synced up with real disk usage, but it doesn't quite feel the same because i think disk usage patterns have changed over the last 20-some years.
I want more stuff like this. The era 20 years ago (e.g. Enlightenment) was way more fun than the bland monotonic design we have these days. If you like bland modern design, great, that should be an option as well, but we should still have good variety.
I don't know why anybody would. It takes all the lessons we learned about UX from user testing in the late 90s/early 00s and throws it all away to produce something that looks "clean" and "sleek", at the cost of being useful. Discoverability? Who needs it?
EDIT: Though I do enjoy skeuomorphism, I do think the TFA goes a bit too far.
Debatable. IIRC Bell labs conducted a study of whether Unix command names should be changed to something more meaningful than cat, sed, grep etc.
They found that words that convey some meaning related to what the command does had little or no effect on the user remembering what the command does. I strongly suspect skeuomorphism similarly has no claim on functional advantage.
Discoverability is good, but it's probably got a little to do with the icon.
> I strongly suspect skeuomorphism similarly has no claim on functional advantage.
I think it does, but for new users only. I hate playing the "is-this-a-button" on modern designs, not knowing what is clickable and what is not. Other games I hate:
- Lets find the scrollbar
- Guess which window has focus
- (Windows-only) Try to predict the application to get focus on alt-tab, then alt-tab again.
A lot of these don't need skeuomorphism to be solved. It just needs clearer designs. Always showing vital elements like the scrollbar isn't a skeuomorphic choice, it's always a good idea, they only started hiding them because it looked 'cleaner' to some UI designer. The same with using color to show window focus, separate distinct elements or foreground from background. Nowadays everything is just white, but this is just a product of visual design trends, not (anti)skeuomorphism.
> they only started hiding them because it looked 'cleaner' to some UI designer.
They started doing it on mobile in order to give more screen real estate to the content area. This was then translated to desktop apps at the same time desktop screen real estate became a non-issue for everyone (a 32" monitor at 1600x1200 used to be a luxury, now it's mundane). Now no one knows if there is anything "below the fold" without initiating a scroll action, which just encourages people to further only focus on the above the fold content.
Interestingly the response to that was sites adding horizontal "progress bars" across the top of the viewport to indicate how much you had read. And with application and website control of the styling and operation of these standard widgets, everyone is slightly different, which increases time to become familiar.
It's been a race to the bottom, in the name of (the subjective at best) "clean design".
« This was then translated to desktop apps at the same time desktop screen real estate became a non-issue for everyone »
Exactly. I remember opening a Metro/TIFKAM app for the first time on my new Windows 8 connected to my new 27" QHD monitor, and then staring in bewilderment as it went fullscreen and 95 % of the screen was just monochrome with nothing on it at all.
Wtf were they thinking? That I would enjoy vanilla sauce on my roastbeef because they weren't serving strawberries yet?
Still puzzling to me how such a multi-billion $ company can fuck up so hard.
> Always showing vital elements like the scrollbar isn't a skeuomorphic choice, it's always a good idea, they only started hiding them because it looked 'cleaner' to some UI designer.
There’s a lot of modern design in not happy with, but this is not personally one of them. If I can’t autohide scrollbars I try to turn them permanently off instead of permanently on. For some reason I find them very distracting, and since I anyway use a scroll wheel or trackpad or keybindings, I don’t need it to scroll. (If it’s on autohide, I use it as a progress bar when actually scrolling.).
But there’s a lot of these weird things that seemingly everyone else accepts that just really throws off my focus. Blinking text cursor is another one, I just can’t get any work done until the blinking is off. If an app or OS can’t do that, I won’t use it.
Skeumorphism isn't necessary for consistency in user interfaces, but it generally ensures a level of consistency that is honestly hard in modern interface design.
Absolutely. I keep falling into these traps. I just got a Mac, and it's terrible at these. It's notorious for hiding the scrollbar, but why would they make it hard to find the thing I just downloaded? Or a screenshot I just took? I can open it, but that doesn't take me to the file location so I can actually do something with it. Although Steam is by far the worst at that.
It's almost as if we didn't learn anything about UX in the past 30 years.
What I hate most about mac is the opinionated design. I liked it in the days of Tiger and Leopard but what I didn't like since was some designer deciding that I have to use my computer in a different way every year and forcing changes on me. Opinionated design only works when you as a user have no opinions or if you are a follower.
Personally I do have strong opinions how my computer should work and I'm not a follower. I could never work in an army and take orders either.
The problem was that early OS X used to be pretty aligned with my own opinions so I didn't notice the issues with this model. But after the Mac becoming more frustrating every year I finally dumped it and now I'm really happy with KDE which I can configure how I want.
Steam screenshots end up somewhere deep in the steam folder structure. Not simply in an easily accessible downloads or screenshots directory in my home dir.
Yeah, those are all legit gripes about modern operating system UX, but none of them are automatically fixed with skeuomorphism, and none of them couldn't be fixed with clearer design regardless of approach.
> none of them are automatically fixed with skeuomorphism
True.
But they absolutely need to stop hiding functionality in order to present a "clean" interface.
Sure, I've seen some cluttered interfaces. I recently launched LibreOffice Calc and damn there were a lot of buttons on that toolbar (I may be using an insanely old version).
But like...disappearing scrollbars makes zero sense and should never have been implemented on any interface.
> disappearing scrollbars makes zero sense and should never have been implemented on any interface.
My biggest gripe about the disappearing scrollbars is the layout shifting that can occur when the content changes making the scrollbar necessary or not. CSS has a few options that can take care of that, but it requires some digging for someone to discover them.
Many apps present content in such a way that makes it impossible to tell if there is anything more on the screen until you actually try to scroll. The home screen of the app is so clean and so fitted that there is nothing poking out from the bottom.
Skeuomorphism isn't the only thing we've lost, and really it's the least important. We're talking smaller ideas, like widgets that aren't just black text on a white background (or if you like dark mode, white text on a grey background), visible scrollbars, menus.
Re: too far - it’s interesting, because there’s two reasons skeumorphism “works” - one is because it provides visual cues for how a virtual object will behave when acted upon, which lets our brain build a quick intuitive understanding of how to interact with a foreign object that draws on all our experience outside the computer, and two is because the visual mimicry of the physical object gives our brains immediate cues to understand what it’s seeing and build that interaction model.
This one absolutely over indexes on that second principle, to a borderline cartoonish degree, but I expect the reason it’s resonating so hard is exactly what you’re indicating, that in the industry’s desire to be able to move on from the tether to the shapes of physical objects, they discarded that first principle entirely, instead of figuring out how to maintain the visual cues to form and operation in a new language.
(Here’s where I throw away all that credibility I just got from the prior two paragraphs: I actually think Liquid Glass is getting closer to a “skeumorphism without skeumorphism” than anything else I’ve seen out there.)
Modern design is not synonymous to dis-empowering design.
FWIW I love modern design, and I hate all these too clever skeuomorphs. Modern design is honest to the digital medium. I find its beauty lies, not in the quirky ways it tries to mimic real textures and objects, but by how it provides usable controls and information by applying basic design elements like spacing, alignment, color, typography, discovery, layered info density, etc. well.
None of these requires skeuomorphs. It is like the difference between thinking a website is visually impressive and stunning because it uses a nice background image. That would not impress me. What would impress me are stuff like: does it have an effective information architecture, as reflected in it main menu and general link structure? Does it use a tasteful and usable color scheme? Does it have an interesting and still usable visual grouping? Etc.
I fully agree with this take. I don't think of a monitor / desktop as a tool that I interact with like I would a hammer; there is nothing intuitive about "open this high-definition representation of a day planner by clicking a button with your thumb on this little round plastic box somewhere else." I simply do not understand the appeal of skeumorphism, frankly I think these things look tacky but that is just my preference.
My interactions are with content, generally as strings of text but often as picture/video/audio. I prefer that my 'desktop' apply the principles you've mentioned, to the problem of tastefully and comfortably arranging, displaying, and manipulating that content, and little else. Some types of controls that lean skeuomorphic, like sliders or switches, may be useful and even intuitive in that endeavor; others, like an analog knob or dial, aren't. If I want to watch a video, display it in a minimal, tasteful frame; I do not need a representation of an old 1970s wooden TV or something.
Well, there's really two things going on here: consumer vs professional. Does an electrician need to "discover" the modes on her multimeter? Naw. Do I need to discover where the wiper controls are on the car I just rented? Absolutely! But I'm not a huge fan of UI fluff that helps me discover things on my work machine.
All the multimeters I've seen had pretty bog standard markings for AC and DC resistance, voltage and current. While not an electrician myself, I think one would be pretty annoyed if a "designer" invented new graphics for alternating current or resistance. They might even gotten hurt or damaged some equipment.
So when consistent UX is applied, both a professional and amateur alike can learn and trust that what they learned carries over.
Weirdly, there is some kind of power play happening with OS UI: "MBA finally in position of influence wants to force their taste on everybody" appears to be a thing.
Your rental car comment reminds me of the time I looked like an idiot trying to open the fuel door on a rented Kia K5 for almost 20 minutes. I don't have a smartphone and didn't have my laptop so had no way to look anything up. Ended up finding this video on the gas station employee's phone (she came out to see if everything was okay. It was not okay.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_e7lZmbjtNo
If you have to release a tutorial video to open your fuel filler door, and that video includes the one easy piece of user interface to do the thing getting thanos-snapped out of existence, I think you did something wrong.
The cause of my problem was I opened the driver's door before turning off the car. The rental didn't have push-to-start like my personal vehicle, and I don't have "turn and remove key" on the mind when exiting a vehicle. Even locking and unlocking the door didn't unlock the fuel door, I had to turn the car back on, lock the doors, turn the car off, then unlock the doors. Why is opening the fuel door so complicated? There doesn't seem to be any way to do it mechanically, so good luck when the solenoid dies.
The UX disaster is not just about looking "clean" and "sleek". It is all about mobile. The choice between bland colored boxes, skeuomorphism and other styles is just looks, it doesn't change the fundamentals.
Here is the problem: smartphones have a small screens and are operated using fat fingers, so you need big buttons and you don't have much space, so you are very limited in the amount of stuff you can put on screen. It also means there is a lot of hidden stuff.
Now that having a mobile app, or a mobile optimized website is often a requirement, the desktop app usually follows the mobile conventions, which is not great, but better than doing it the other way. Having two entirely different apps to make the best use of the platform is possible, but it is expensive, and you want to maintain some level of consistency, so that users switching between desktop and mobile won't be lost. You probably want to maintain branding too.
To me, it is not that designers don't know how to do good UX like they did in the 90s/00s, it is that there are contradictory requirements and they have to make compromises.
It wouldn't be so important if things didn't change so much over the years. The CLI has stayed fairly consistent over the past 40 or so years. Can't say the same about GUI, though.
I wouldn't have to rediscover all functionality if designers didn't shuffle things around for no reason. Though, that's mostly a Windows thing, which I have to use for work.
Do all those toggle switches and dials and sliders actually help discovery for people who grew up with iPads? Maybe their function is only obvious to us dinosaurs.
These lessons made sense for users born before personal computers, but it's debatable if these lessons are transferable to so called "digital native" users.
Most "flat" designed modern apps fail miserably at discovery. Most hide things in hamburger menus or require weird random swipes in odd directions with zero visual indicators.
I got bit by this recently. Brave on android has no "forward button in the app menu, it only has back. Chrome has both forward and back in the menu. Both browsers support swiping from the right side to go forward in the history stack (although this seems to be overloaded with switching tabs in a tab group), which I discovered by accident. What's odd about this though is that the device has a global back button that is also used for backward history navigation, but that's been duplicated in brave with an additional back action in the menu, but the forward history navigation is entirely hidden and has only one way to invoke it: via swiping.
I think it depends on audience. I think there is a place for the 'Microsoft Bob' s of the world. My 90+ year old grandma would probably use a computer if we sanded down all the hard edges and kept her in a box (computationally speaking). Hell my 70+ year old mother, even though she's had a computer for 35ish years prefers her ipad for just that reason (simpler than her hand-me-down macbooks i keep her supplied with).
As someone who runs a super-boring, stock tiler with zero decoration or bling; couldn't agree more. It's this kind of thing that gets new users interested in Linux. _I_ started using Linux because I saw some video of wobbly windows, and desktops on a giant rotating cube.
I look back at my Enlightenment desktop with joy. I guess many people hated all the tinkering with drivers & settings etc, but I loved it. Spending a few weekends getting a computer running with Linux and Enlightenment exactly like I wanted it to and then actually using that as my main driver for years are very nice memories.
> Spending a few weekends getting a computer running with Linux and Enlightenment exactly like I wanted it to and then actually using that as my main driver for years are very nice memories.
Years? The novelty wore off in a week with Enlightenment's constant crashing :-(
Anyway, I look forward to more Window Managers (Hell, even a whole DE) that put the fun and whimsy back into computing.
I used to use e17 on my daily driver phone. Illume was a nice UI, but you (or your distro) did have to find a good revision to not have it crash indeed :)
My distro was Slackware, prior to any sort of package management, so, yeah, things would crash, but IIRC, Enlightenment, as much as I loved the use, look and feel, just crashed way too often.
Call me insane but I still think xfce and Enlightenment should do a fusion become one project. Get rid of the GNOME shenanigans on GTK and rewrite all xfce apps and stuff in the e libraries.
Is it just a default theme difference, or is the current version actually less themable?
Also, the person you replied to mentioned Moksha; that's a fork of Enlightenment 17 (which is what at least two of your cool-looking example screenshots appear to be from).
I would like a Linux desktop that doesn't suck first, then they can make it pretty. Every Linux desktop I've used in the past decade is either so minimal it's barely usable, or so feature-filled it takes up gigs of ram, or in the middle with broken clunky features (where I am now with LXQt). And the worst thing is, it's all the same goddamn thing as what we had 20 years ago, but somehow keeps getting rewritten to be slower and suckier.
I installed Debian with KDE on a couple of non-techy relatives' mid-range laptops around Covid, and in spite of KDE being notorious for its abundance of features, neither of those relatives have ever complained about slowness or lag. That era seems far in the past now.
Kinda same, I want there to be something reasonable that 99% of people can agree on. It shouldn't be that hard. Things seemed fine back with Gnome2, then, everything changed when the
I was just thinking about this the other week, when I bought an old iPhone, from the skeumorphic era, for nostalgic purposes. I've wanted one for years -- I only had the newer ones that were flat.
I always thought, nah, I'm just seeing thru rose tinted glasses, surely it wasn't that cool, I'm gonna be disappointed...
Well, I finally got one, and oh boy. It's even better than I imagined. There's just so much love and care put into the designs. We really lost something special.
(p.s. if you get a really old iPhone, don't reset the device. It's impossible to activate them now, found out the hard way.)
Every time some permanent downgrade was made to iPhones, everyone said you're afraid of change / it's nostalgia / you'll get used to it. Nope. iPhone 5S (or SE?) running iOS 6 is still the best combo ever. iOS 7 ruined the design, and it never fully recovered. BT is still not a replacement for headphone jack. The swipe gestures get mis-inputted all the time. Liquid Glass actually looked nice, but it introduced Android-level lag and glitches, like 1/3 of the time my camera doesn't load.
Biggest thing though, they broke the keyboard. Thought I was losing my mind after years of using a 6, 6S, 12 mini and still mistyping horribly. Then I picked up my iPhone 5 that hadn't been touched in years since ATT banned it, so there's no way I'm used to it... Instantly typed way faster with 0 mistakes. I'm not the only one, there must be some Ba Sing Se type of denial going on at Apple with the keyboard.
If it's so bad, why am I even using it? I'm kinda not. I use my laptop whenever possible now. I call more often than texting on my phone, and on speakerphone instead of earbuds. It didn't get fixed, just had to adapt. And all of this is practicality, not even touching how special the old iPhone felt.
The main difficulty I see in these "RETVRN TO SOVL" things is not the window-manager or desktop itself but the UI toolkits for the applications. GTK2 had so many excellent themes. Now GTK or libadwaita seem designed to resist themes and introduce constant breaking of selectors or widgets or whatnot. I believe they griefed the themers into just giving up. I have less knowledge about Qt, but I assume it's probably the better pick these days.
Earlier today I was reading through the KDE 6.8 release notes and I found out about Union [0][1], which is a unified theming system for QtQuick and QtWidgets using a single CSS source file. Hopefully this encourages a bit more creative experimentation, although I'm quite happy with the default theme at this point. It feel very comfy to me.
To say nothing of client side decorations, which diverge the user interface among apps and remove control from the user to globally customize some aspect of their application window management/theming.
Man, first Felix Reiseberg[0], then OpenCode 2.0[1], and now this in the last 24 hrs. Really giving off heavy Myst vibes. They are briefly interesting encounters, buy I deeply hope this isn't a legitimate UI trend.
It's hardly even skeuomorphism, it's a almost digital twin rendered with Phong.
I like this kind of stuff but I think the analogy work the best around objects that are actually on the desk. Wardrobes or steampunk looking instrument is a bit too much.
I'm typically not a big proponent of skeuomorphism, but it's nice to have actual variety of experimental options, a bit like the crazy things people did with UIs back in the old days.
It seems like the developer is Japanese (the dev log is in Japanese according to the readme) so for once I am willing to believe this is a case of “the dev is not a native speaker” - but yes, I wondered several times reading the readme if this whole thing is vibe coded
I feel like that was simply a limitation of the hardware at the time. Given modern hardware, I'm willing to bet that people of the 2000s would have made wild stuff.
Totally. Using Windows Vista Ultimate just for using Windows DreamScene ( e.g playing a video as a desktop background). Totally dumb, totally destroyed performance, totally cool :D
I stand by that OS X Maverick was the most beautiful of all the macOS releases.
Actually that OS in general is what convinced me to buy a mac in like 2014; it felt like nearly every criticism I had with macOS at the time had been addressed. I miss those days.
Agreed, but I also don't really care as long as it's usable. Some flat design made things harder to see/read, but by Sequoia, they'd figured out how much depth needed to be added. Tahoe / Liquid Glass is whatever, I have high-contrast mode which nullifies it.
I thought Maverick reduced the skeuomorphism, I was glad to see it removed. Apple had got to a point where shadows and reflections weren't consistent between icons and windows and the Dock. Briefly, Microsoft lead good design with Metro and the flat, minimal background noise.
I felt like Mavericks had just the right amount of skeuomorphism. Not enough to be annoying but just enough to be aesthetic.
I was never a fan of the Metro flat design that took over, though admittedly my desktop now is a purposefully unsexy Sway desktop that is completely flat and I do like that.
I reckon a lot of the people clamoring for these things are gen z or younger first discovering the idea of customizable OS's and are now going through all the awful decisions that were made before. Pretty sure I've seen a version of this skeuomorphic desktop like 15 times at this point.
The children yearn for Microsoft Bob - which took this idea a bit further:
"Microsoft Bob presented screens showing a house, with rooms that the user could visit containing familiar objects corresponding to computer applications, such as a desk with pen and paper and a checkbook. Clicking on the pen and paper would open the system's word processor."
Some level of skeuomorphic design is quite nice, like what we saw from Apple during the Forstall era. It seemed to strike a good balance.
Something like Microsoft BOB takes the metaphor too far and gets weird.
I think this project leans on it a little too hard, but a balanced approach can make the systems quite charming and provide a nice juxtaposition to the very austere hardware we have these days.
That might be the thing. In real life you don't use the same stationary for years. Your desk is a reflection of your mood and evolves almost daily. Maybe that's where these fail?
The entire concept of skeuomorphism on computers is nonsensical. A monitor has a default blank grey or black appearance. EVERYTHING else is skeuomorphic, including the ugly 'modern' color rectangles the people who use this word want to exempt.
This is neat, it’s not for me (I prefer extreme minimalism) but I could see how some would prefer it. I like how we’re getting more desktop options now thanks to wlroots.
Love skeuomorphism. This just gave me a reminder to build a paper-like calendar app now, with pencil markings showing events.
I definitely don't want a skeuomorphic desktop, but little web-apps, text editors, chat apps? I say we need a lot more of this type of design there, especially with how good modern CSS is at this kind of thing.
Love this so much. I've been thinking of trying to represent my notes in a way like this where categories of material are "stored together" not in folders, but "physical" items that represent the category like a globe for travel notes or a bookshelves of movie reviews etc.
I always think about video game UI's when I read the skeuomorphic design arugments. I suspect video games use them, at the very least, because they are delightful and fun; which, in my opinion, is a good reason to do something anywhere.
I will say that a long time ago I installed enlightenment and after about 10 minutes the burning windows felt like they were getting in the way, so I guess, like everything, there should be balance.
the "paper windows" idea doesn't seem to have been done with as much soul as the rest of the ui. Just a turned up corner. I reckon something done there could really tie this together
fwiw that is the standard term for that kind of fold (to the extent that it has its own wikipedia article), but I agree that the claude prose is gross.
Fantastic. Giving me memories of MS Bob. Put a talking animal assistant in the corner and you’ve got it. Oh, and you could connect the assistant to an LLM of course.
Reminds me of the launcher I build in HyperCard when I was like 10 y/o. It consisted of some graphic of a desk an I could click different objects to run applications.
This looks like something that heavily relies on a pointer device and thus is the opposite of what I want. But it can probably work well for people not minding this detail. Might even work better in VR.
I think AR/XR glasses are going to start to become popular in the next couple of years and I think some mixed reality shells will have more physical/3d interfaces.
Skeuomorphic design was a solution to teaching the customer how to use the digital product, but I wish we have more of its side effects like shadows, icons that pop and other things that are pleasant for the eye and depth.
I don't know if it's just because it was better or am I just tired of the current white (like #FFFFFF white) backgrounds with everything flat and not connected. I would like my browser tabs to be in the shape of a physical tab in notebooks.
Skeuomorphism should make my life easier. But sometimes it goes against that. I want to have a button that prints my document, I don't want to have to operate a virtual letter press. Having a switch to turn something on and off that looks like a switch helps me. A screen door that is the lock activation isn't what I would expect.
Very interesting concept but I doubt it's stable due to the amount of slopped code and I don't like that it requires a hodgepoge of libraries from different DEs.
In Brett Victor's 2011 essay, "A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design", he laid out the foundation for his critique of skeuomorphic design. He believes hands are our future.
On the visual pretense: "Pictures Under Glass sacrifice all the tactile richness of working with our hands, offering instead a hokey visual facade."
On touchscreens mimicking real objects without haptics: "Pictures Under Glass is an interaction paradigm of permanent numbness. It's a Novocaine drip to the wrist. It denies our hands what they do best."
On why this design path is short-sighted: "To me, claiming that Pictures Under Glass is the future of interaction is like claiming that black-and-white is the future of photography. It's obviously a transitional technology. And the sooner we transition, the better."
Yes! Please bring back the soul we had with retro OS GUIs (and the speed)... it's time for a resurgence. Especially with new systems/RAM/GPUs/etc. not being a thing for quite a while for a lot of people now.
The thing I hate with vibed apps the most is zero seconds spend on how things around what is being build are already structured and what problems was already solved, just focusing on shiny result.
`sudo sh scripts/install_debian.sh`, a 583 lines long script, basically now a whole software just to handle the installation of this project on one distribution, seriously?
If we vibecode already, just do the normal packaging.
This project highlights why designers hate skeuomorphism. Skeuomorphism looks tacky unless done very very well. Skeuomorphic design under Steve Jobs looked very good. This doesn't come close.
This is a really enjoyable take, pushing the feeling of what one does on a computer towards actually being at a desk and having to reach for various functions. I feel like that would enable spatial memory to do some cool things.
I miss the 90s chunkiness of switches, buttons, hardware: being able to hear the computer "think" (HDD seeks), the hum of a CRT. Modern machinery feels so insubstantial, emphasizing clean glass and tidy machined chassis. (chassies?)
I have this persistent daydream about a computer setup that feels like the Nostromo flight deck from Alien. I almost want to feel like I'm sitting _inside_ a computer when I'm at my desk, surrounded by powerful feeling electronics with substantial switches and such. Of course there's plenty of inconvenience there too, but something about it appeals to me.
Singular and plural chassis are spelled the same, but that doesn't make it right! I'm more inclined to spell it chassises personally.
Chasses :-)
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-sis
Spelled the same, but pronounced differently: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/chassis
Replace language with an actually sensible one, and press any key to continue!
If nothing else, that is a truly sadistic trivia question. I wonder if there are any other words in the English language whose plural form is spelled the same, but pronounced differently.
Buggerall.
Chassipodes
Chassae.
Chassis'
You want your key input controls to be based off of the book _The Secret Doctrine_ by Helena Blavatsky? [0]
[0] https://www.jwz.org/blog/2014/12/alien-1970s-city-futura-hel...
Is that the new rick roll? What's up?
That is strange.
The URL only works properly with Firefox in Private mode or with LibreWolf.
Guess the person that runs the community does not like HN.
Oh wow ! What a weird thing to stumble upon. First time it happens to me, kudos to them.
Have a good one!
Edit0: and cool link thanks!
We just need to add more sound effects tied to system monitor probes to get those HDD noises back, kinda like how electric cars have that parking lot noise to make sure pedestrians are aware of them in lieu of an engine banging away! Being inside the computer like being at a pipe organ console, or surrounded by screens like a hacker in a dystopian hovercraft!
My desktop is wired up using Ethernet over powerline (was easier than running a cable) and it creates some noise through my desktop speakers.
The issue is easily fixed with better grounding, but I’ve found that I prefer the noise. I can hear my network traffic, and I’ve come to use it as mental input. (“Op, I can hear that my script has reached the write-to-s3 step”)
a couple weeks ago i was lamenting the lack of hard-drive noises to know when my computer was "thinking", and came across this fun little app:
https://disknoice-655ee8.gitlab.io/
it's got the right noises and i believe that they are synced up with real disk usage, but it doesn't quite feel the same because i think disk usage patterns have changed over the last 20-some years.
Hey you may like this project: https://github.com/AdoPi/wlgblock
pushing the feeling of what one does on a computer towards actually being at a desk and having to reach for various functions
I love this. And it also reminds me of Magic Desk for the Commodore 64.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Desk
I now have a reason to put Linux on my old Intel Mac.
I want more stuff like this. The era 20 years ago (e.g. Enlightenment) was way more fun than the bland monotonic design we have these days. If you like bland modern design, great, that should be an option as well, but we should still have good variety.
> If you like bland modern design, great,
I don't know why anybody would. It takes all the lessons we learned about UX from user testing in the late 90s/early 00s and throws it all away to produce something that looks "clean" and "sleek", at the cost of being useful. Discoverability? Who needs it?
EDIT: Though I do enjoy skeuomorphism, I do think the TFA goes a bit too far.
Debatable. IIRC Bell labs conducted a study of whether Unix command names should be changed to something more meaningful than cat, sed, grep etc.
They found that words that convey some meaning related to what the command does had little or no effect on the user remembering what the command does. I strongly suspect skeuomorphism similarly has no claim on functional advantage.
Discoverability is good, but it's probably got a little to do with the icon.
> I strongly suspect skeuomorphism similarly has no claim on functional advantage.
I think it does, but for new users only. I hate playing the "is-this-a-button" on modern designs, not knowing what is clickable and what is not. Other games I hate:
- Lets find the scrollbar
- Guess which window has focus
- (Windows-only) Try to predict the application to get focus on alt-tab, then alt-tab again.
- How do I find the file that just downloaded?
A lot of these don't need skeuomorphism to be solved. It just needs clearer designs. Always showing vital elements like the scrollbar isn't a skeuomorphic choice, it's always a good idea, they only started hiding them because it looked 'cleaner' to some UI designer. The same with using color to show window focus, separate distinct elements or foreground from background. Nowadays everything is just white, but this is just a product of visual design trends, not (anti)skeuomorphism.
> they only started hiding them because it looked 'cleaner' to some UI designer.
They started doing it on mobile in order to give more screen real estate to the content area. This was then translated to desktop apps at the same time desktop screen real estate became a non-issue for everyone (a 32" monitor at 1600x1200 used to be a luxury, now it's mundane). Now no one knows if there is anything "below the fold" without initiating a scroll action, which just encourages people to further only focus on the above the fold content.
Interestingly the response to that was sites adding horizontal "progress bars" across the top of the viewport to indicate how much you had read. And with application and website control of the styling and operation of these standard widgets, everyone is slightly different, which increases time to become familiar.
It's been a race to the bottom, in the name of (the subjective at best) "clean design".
« This was then translated to desktop apps at the same time desktop screen real estate became a non-issue for everyone »
Exactly. I remember opening a Metro/TIFKAM app for the first time on my new Windows 8 connected to my new 27" QHD monitor, and then staring in bewilderment as it went fullscreen and 95 % of the screen was just monochrome with nothing on it at all.
Wtf were they thinking? That I would enjoy vanilla sauce on my roastbeef because they weren't serving strawberries yet?
Still puzzling to me how such a multi-billion $ company can fuck up so hard.
I feel like wide screens and ultra-wide screens are massively under-utilised in UX design and there’s a lot of untapped potential there.
> Always showing vital elements like the scrollbar isn't a skeuomorphic choice, it's always a good idea, they only started hiding them because it looked 'cleaner' to some UI designer.
There’s a lot of modern design in not happy with, but this is not personally one of them. If I can’t autohide scrollbars I try to turn them permanently off instead of permanently on. For some reason I find them very distracting, and since I anyway use a scroll wheel or trackpad or keybindings, I don’t need it to scroll. (If it’s on autohide, I use it as a progress bar when actually scrolling.).
But there’s a lot of these weird things that seemingly everyone else accepts that just really throws off my focus. Blinking text cursor is another one, I just can’t get any work done until the blinking is off. If an app or OS can’t do that, I won’t use it.
Skeumorphism isn't necessary for consistency in user interfaces, but it generally ensures a level of consistency that is honestly hard in modern interface design.
Absolutely. I keep falling into these traps. I just got a Mac, and it's terrible at these. It's notorious for hiding the scrollbar, but why would they make it hard to find the thing I just downloaded? Or a screenshot I just took? I can open it, but that doesn't take me to the file location so I can actually do something with it. Although Steam is by far the worst at that.
It's almost as if we didn't learn anything about UX in the past 30 years.
What I hate most about mac is the opinionated design. I liked it in the days of Tiger and Leopard but what I didn't like since was some designer deciding that I have to use my computer in a different way every year and forcing changes on me. Opinionated design only works when you as a user have no opinions or if you are a follower.
Personally I do have strong opinions how my computer should work and I'm not a follower. I could never work in an army and take orders either.
The problem was that early OS X used to be pretty aligned with my own opinions so I didn't notice the issues with this model. But after the Mac becoming more frustrating every year I finally dumped it and now I'm really happy with KDE which I can configure how I want.
UX was mastered 31 years ago. The intervening years have been a nosedive.
> why would they make it hard to find the thing I just downloaded?
In… the downloads folder? How much more obvious does the location need to be?
What do you mean about Steam?
Steam screenshots end up somewhere deep in the steam folder structure. Not simply in an easily accessible downloads or screenshots directory in my home dir.
Yeah, those are all legit gripes about modern operating system UX, but none of them are automatically fixed with skeuomorphism, and none of them couldn't be fixed with clearer design regardless of approach.
> none of them are automatically fixed with skeuomorphism
True.
But they absolutely need to stop hiding functionality in order to present a "clean" interface.
Sure, I've seen some cluttered interfaces. I recently launched LibreOffice Calc and damn there were a lot of buttons on that toolbar (I may be using an insanely old version).
But like...disappearing scrollbars makes zero sense and should never have been implemented on any interface.
> disappearing scrollbars makes zero sense and should never have been implemented on any interface.
My biggest gripe about the disappearing scrollbars is the layout shifting that can occur when the content changes making the scrollbar necessary or not. CSS has a few options that can take care of that, but it requires some digging for someone to discover them.
- Should there even be a scrollbar?
Many apps present content in such a way that makes it impossible to tell if there is anything more on the screen until you actually try to scroll. The home screen of the app is so clean and so fitted that there is nothing poking out from the bottom.
oh gawd, please please please do not interpret this as pagination of windows with overflowing content!
the image carousel type dots or similar old skool pagination indicators are so much worse than a simple scroll bar.
>Lets find the scrollbar
Related: Whoever decided to allow to websites style browser scroll bars, should have their teeth kicked in.
> Guess which window has focus
Used to be a solved problem before some ** messed it up. I hate that game too.
Skeuomorphism isn't the only thing we've lost, and really it's the least important. We're talking smaller ideas, like widgets that aren't just black text on a white background (or if you like dark mode, white text on a grey background), visible scrollbars, menus.
I love knowing that a "Get-Foo" function in a library I've never before isn't going to have side-effects (unless malicious).
Conventions are great for UX.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/devel...
That has nothing to do with discoverability. Discoverability isn't about "guessing" it's about being able to see it.
Discoverability in CLI is --help. But you can't discover you have to use --help. So CLI is always fundamentally worse than GUI.
It helps that for most cli tools, any incorrect usage will show the usage text, including --help
You also have to just know what program to invoke with the —help arg.
Good luck guessing ‘grep’ from first principles.
Man -k is often good for this
Re: too far - it’s interesting, because there’s two reasons skeumorphism “works” - one is because it provides visual cues for how a virtual object will behave when acted upon, which lets our brain build a quick intuitive understanding of how to interact with a foreign object that draws on all our experience outside the computer, and two is because the visual mimicry of the physical object gives our brains immediate cues to understand what it’s seeing and build that interaction model.
This one absolutely over indexes on that second principle, to a borderline cartoonish degree, but I expect the reason it’s resonating so hard is exactly what you’re indicating, that in the industry’s desire to be able to move on from the tether to the shapes of physical objects, they discarded that first principle entirely, instead of figuring out how to maintain the visual cues to form and operation in a new language.
(Here’s where I throw away all that credibility I just got from the prior two paragraphs: I actually think Liquid Glass is getting closer to a “skeumorphism without skeumorphism” than anything else I’ve seen out there.)
Modern design is not synonymous to dis-empowering design.
FWIW I love modern design, and I hate all these too clever skeuomorphs. Modern design is honest to the digital medium. I find its beauty lies, not in the quirky ways it tries to mimic real textures and objects, but by how it provides usable controls and information by applying basic design elements like spacing, alignment, color, typography, discovery, layered info density, etc. well.
None of these requires skeuomorphs. It is like the difference between thinking a website is visually impressive and stunning because it uses a nice background image. That would not impress me. What would impress me are stuff like: does it have an effective information architecture, as reflected in it main menu and general link structure? Does it use a tasteful and usable color scheme? Does it have an interesting and still usable visual grouping? Etc.
I fully agree with this take. I don't think of a monitor / desktop as a tool that I interact with like I would a hammer; there is nothing intuitive about "open this high-definition representation of a day planner by clicking a button with your thumb on this little round plastic box somewhere else." I simply do not understand the appeal of skeumorphism, frankly I think these things look tacky but that is just my preference.
My interactions are with content, generally as strings of text but often as picture/video/audio. I prefer that my 'desktop' apply the principles you've mentioned, to the problem of tastefully and comfortably arranging, displaying, and manipulating that content, and little else. Some types of controls that lean skeuomorphic, like sliders or switches, may be useful and even intuitive in that endeavor; others, like an analog knob or dial, aren't. If I want to watch a video, display it in a minimal, tasteful frame; I do not need a representation of an old 1970s wooden TV or something.
> I don't know why anybody would.
Well, there's really two things going on here: consumer vs professional. Does an electrician need to "discover" the modes on her multimeter? Naw. Do I need to discover where the wiper controls are on the car I just rented? Absolutely! But I'm not a huge fan of UI fluff that helps me discover things on my work machine.
All the multimeters I've seen had pretty bog standard markings for AC and DC resistance, voltage and current. While not an electrician myself, I think one would be pretty annoyed if a "designer" invented new graphics for alternating current or resistance. They might even gotten hurt or damaged some equipment.
So when consistent UX is applied, both a professional and amateur alike can learn and trust that what they learned carries over.
The idea of "one size fits all" was never true.
Weirdly, there is some kind of power play happening with OS UI: "MBA finally in position of influence wants to force their taste on everybody" appears to be a thing.
Your rental car comment reminds me of the time I looked like an idiot trying to open the fuel door on a rented Kia K5 for almost 20 minutes. I don't have a smartphone and didn't have my laptop so had no way to look anything up. Ended up finding this video on the gas station employee's phone (she came out to see if everything was okay. It was not okay.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_e7lZmbjtNo
If you have to release a tutorial video to open your fuel filler door, and that video includes the one easy piece of user interface to do the thing getting thanos-snapped out of existence, I think you did something wrong.
The cause of my problem was I opened the driver's door before turning off the car. The rental didn't have push-to-start like my personal vehicle, and I don't have "turn and remove key" on the mind when exiting a vehicle. Even locking and unlocking the door didn't unlock the fuel door, I had to turn the car back on, lock the doors, turn the car off, then unlock the doors. Why is opening the fuel door so complicated? There doesn't seem to be any way to do it mechanically, so good luck when the solenoid dies.
The fact that it requires a very specific sequence of state change to unlock is the issue.
Plenty of cars have automatic fuel door locks that work seamlessly.
Hahahaha the first time I tried to get into a Tesla and couldn’t figure out how to open the doors from the outside.
The UX disaster is not just about looking "clean" and "sleek". It is all about mobile. The choice between bland colored boxes, skeuomorphism and other styles is just looks, it doesn't change the fundamentals.
Here is the problem: smartphones have a small screens and are operated using fat fingers, so you need big buttons and you don't have much space, so you are very limited in the amount of stuff you can put on screen. It also means there is a lot of hidden stuff.
Now that having a mobile app, or a mobile optimized website is often a requirement, the desktop app usually follows the mobile conventions, which is not great, but better than doing it the other way. Having two entirely different apps to make the best use of the platform is possible, but it is expensive, and you want to maintain some level of consistency, so that users switching between desktop and mobile won't be lost. You probably want to maintain branding too.
To me, it is not that designers don't know how to do good UX like they did in the 90s/00s, it is that there are contradictory requirements and they have to make compromises.
> Discoverability? Who needs it?
It wouldn't be so important if things didn't change so much over the years. The CLI has stayed fairly consistent over the past 40 or so years. Can't say the same about GUI, though.
I wouldn't have to rediscover all functionality if designers didn't shuffle things around for no reason. Though, that's mostly a Windows thing, which I have to use for work.
Do all those toggle switches and dials and sliders actually help discovery for people who grew up with iPads? Maybe their function is only obvious to us dinosaurs.
Way too far. I don't want my desktop to look like a puzzle straight out of Myst, or a reinvention of Bob.
In fairness, this is Myst not Bob.
These lessons made sense for users born before personal computers, but it's debatable if these lessons are transferable to so called "digital native" users.
Ha I feel like modern interior design and apartment design does exactly the same thing these days. Everything looks the same kind of bland.
Microsoft BOB!
> Discoverability? Who needs it?
Most "flat" designed modern apps fail miserably at discovery. Most hide things in hamburger menus or require weird random swipes in odd directions with zero visual indicators.
I got bit by this recently. Brave on android has no "forward button in the app menu, it only has back. Chrome has both forward and back in the menu. Both browsers support swiping from the right side to go forward in the history stack (although this seems to be overloaded with switching tabs in a tab group), which I discovered by accident. What's odd about this though is that the device has a global back button that is also used for backward history navigation, but that's been duplicated in brave with an additional back action in the menu, but the forward history navigation is entirely hidden and has only one way to invoke it: via swiping.
I think it depends on audience. I think there is a place for the 'Microsoft Bob' s of the world. My 90+ year old grandma would probably use a computer if we sanded down all the hard edges and kept her in a box (computationally speaking). Hell my 70+ year old mother, even though she's had a computer for 35ish years prefers her ipad for just that reason (simpler than her hand-me-down macbooks i keep her supplied with).
As someone who runs a super-boring, stock tiler with zero decoration or bling; couldn't agree more. It's this kind of thing that gets new users interested in Linux. _I_ started using Linux because I saw some video of wobbly windows, and desktops on a giant rotating cube.
KDE 6, at least as the latest Kubuntu has it configured, has the wobble back by default.
It hasn't annoyed me enough to disable it just yet, but it's only been a week.
Me too! I was drawn to trying out Ubuntu from seeing all the cool Compiz effects.
I still run the Burn My Windows Gnome extension on all my desktops with a short "TV Effect" activated when a windows closes. It's just perfect!
https://github.com/schneegans/burn-my-windows
It's probably not the same one, but I suddenly had Project Looking Glass flashbacks
That was Compiz iirc. I remember turning it on for a laugh.
I look back at my Enlightenment desktop with joy. I guess many people hated all the tinkering with drivers & settings etc, but I loved it. Spending a few weekends getting a computer running with Linux and Enlightenment exactly like I wanted it to and then actually using that as my main driver for years are very nice memories.
> Spending a few weekends getting a computer running with Linux and Enlightenment exactly like I wanted it to and then actually using that as my main driver for years are very nice memories.
Years? The novelty wore off in a week with Enlightenment's constant crashing :-(
Anyway, I look forward to more Window Managers (Hell, even a whole DE) that put the fun and whimsy back into computing.
I used to use e17 on my daily driver phone. Illume was a nice UI, but you (or your distro) did have to find a good revision to not have it crash indeed :)
My distro was Slackware, prior to any sort of package management, so, yeah, things would crash, but IIRC, Enlightenment, as much as I loved the use, look and feel, just crashed way too often.
What stops you from using it now?
Call me insane but I still think xfce and Enlightenment should do a fusion become one project. Get rid of the GNOME shenanigans on GTK and rewrite all xfce apps and stuff in the e libraries.
>if you like bland, that should be an option too
That's the main thing we lost, isn't it? Options. I remember playing with so many different themes back in the day.
What do you mean 20 years ago? I still use enlightenment today (Moksha Desktop)
> What do you mean 20 years ago? I still use enlightenment today (Moksha Desktop)
Enlightenment today (https://www.enlightenment.org/_media/aa/shot-2021-12-13_17-4...) looks nowhere nearly as cool as it used to:
https://imgur.com/enlightenment-are-we-posting-throwbacks-de...
http://robert.thegeakes.co.uk/images/elive.jpg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:E17_screenshot.jpg
https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/fq4y3c/e17_found_...
The one today doesn't look skeuomorphic at all
Is it just a default theme difference, or is the current version actually less themable?
Also, the person you replied to mentioned Moksha; that's a fork of Enlightenment 17 (which is what at least two of your cool-looking example screenshots appear to be from).
If the 23oz Of Glass or Orange Juice themes are usable I’ll switch right now
I feel that a desktop like this would just occupy parts of my cognition for no good reason. Not sure.
e16/e17 was a lot of fun, and it was fast.
e17 (Moksha) IS still fun!
https://www.bodhilinux.com/moksha-desktop/
I would like a Linux desktop that doesn't suck first, then they can make it pretty. Every Linux desktop I've used in the past decade is either so minimal it's barely usable, or so feature-filled it takes up gigs of ram, or in the middle with broken clunky features (where I am now with LXQt). And the worst thing is, it's all the same goddamn thing as what we had 20 years ago, but somehow keeps getting rewritten to be slower and suckier.
I installed Debian with KDE on a couple of non-techy relatives' mid-range laptops around Covid, and in spite of KDE being notorious for its abundance of features, neither of those relatives have ever complained about slowness or lag. That era seems far in the past now.
Give Mint Debian a try - I've been very happy with it.
https://linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php
Kinda same, I want there to be something reasonable that 99% of people can agree on. It shouldn't be that hard. Things seemed fine back with Gnome2, then, everything changed when the
This warms my heart.
I was just thinking about this the other week, when I bought an old iPhone, from the skeumorphic era, for nostalgic purposes. I've wanted one for years -- I only had the newer ones that were flat.
I always thought, nah, I'm just seeing thru rose tinted glasses, surely it wasn't that cool, I'm gonna be disappointed...
Well, I finally got one, and oh boy. It's even better than I imagined. There's just so much love and care put into the designs. We really lost something special.
(p.s. if you get a really old iPhone, don't reset the device. It's impossible to activate them now, found out the hard way.)
Every time some permanent downgrade was made to iPhones, everyone said you're afraid of change / it's nostalgia / you'll get used to it. Nope. iPhone 5S (or SE?) running iOS 6 is still the best combo ever. iOS 7 ruined the design, and it never fully recovered. BT is still not a replacement for headphone jack. The swipe gestures get mis-inputted all the time. Liquid Glass actually looked nice, but it introduced Android-level lag and glitches, like 1/3 of the time my camera doesn't load.
Biggest thing though, they broke the keyboard. Thought I was losing my mind after years of using a 6, 6S, 12 mini and still mistyping horribly. Then I picked up my iPhone 5 that hadn't been touched in years since ATT banned it, so there's no way I'm used to it... Instantly typed way faster with 0 mistakes. I'm not the only one, there must be some Ba Sing Se type of denial going on at Apple with the keyboard.
If it's so bad, why am I even using it? I'm kinda not. I use my laptop whenever possible now. I call more often than texting on my phone, and on speakerphone instead of earbuds. It didn't get fixed, just had to adapt. And all of this is practicality, not even touching how special the old iPhone felt.
> It's impossible to activate them now
There's easy jailbreak options to bypass the activation for those and have a functional device, nowdays.
The main difficulty I see in these "RETVRN TO SOVL" things is not the window-manager or desktop itself but the UI toolkits for the applications. GTK2 had so many excellent themes. Now GTK or libadwaita seem designed to resist themes and introduce constant breaking of selectors or widgets or whatnot. I believe they griefed the themers into just giving up. I have less knowledge about Qt, but I assume it's probably the better pick these days.
Earlier today I was reading through the KDE 6.8 release notes and I found out about Union [0][1], which is a unified theming system for QtQuick and QtWidgets using a single CSS source file. Hopefully this encourages a bit more creative experimentation, although I'm quite happy with the default theme at this point. It feel very comfy to me.
[0] https://quantumproductions.info/articles/2026-08/union-summe...
[1] https://akselmo.dev/posts/union-qtwidgets/
To say nothing of client side decorations, which diverge the user interface among apps and remove control from the user to globally customize some aspect of their application window management/theming.
Man, first Felix Reiseberg[0], then OpenCode 2.0[1], and now this in the last 24 hrs. Really giving off heavy Myst vibes. They are briefly interesting encounters, buy I deeply hope this isn't a legitimate UI trend.
It's hardly even skeuomorphism, it's a almost digital twin rendered with Phong.
[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50082470
[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50094994
I like this kind of stuff but I think the analogy work the best around objects that are actually on the desk. Wardrobes or steampunk looking instrument is a bit too much.
This is very funny. But I think it would make me feel like I was working inside of Papers Please or some similar game.
Most people are to one degree or another.
I'm typically not a big proponent of skeuomorphism, but it's nice to have actual variety of experimental options, a bit like the crazy things people did with UIs back in the old days.
The README being so full of AI prose is super grating.
It seems like the developer is Japanese (the dev log is in Japanese according to the readme) so for once I am willing to believe this is a case of “the dev is not a native speaker” - but yes, I wondered several times reading the readme if this whole thing is vibe coded
> the kind iOS 6 had
> The room is ray-traced
imho, part of the charm of iOS6 was that everything was baked into native-resolution textures.
I feel like that was simply a limitation of the hardware at the time. Given modern hardware, I'm willing to bet that people of the 2000s would have made wild stuff.
Totally. Using Windows Vista Ultimate just for using Windows DreamScene ( e.g playing a video as a desktop background). Totally dumb, totally destroyed performance, totally cool :D
I stand by that OS X Maverick was the most beautiful of all the macOS releases.
Actually that OS in general is what convinced me to buy a mac in like 2014; it felt like nearly every criticism I had with macOS at the time had been addressed. I miss those days.
Agreed, but I also don't really care as long as it's usable. Some flat design made things harder to see/read, but by Sequoia, they'd figured out how much depth needed to be added. Tahoe / Liquid Glass is whatever, I have high-contrast mode which nullifies it.
I thought Maverick reduced the skeuomorphism, I was glad to see it removed. Apple had got to a point where shadows and reflections weren't consistent between icons and windows and the Dock. Briefly, Microsoft lead good design with Metro and the flat, minimal background noise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_(design_language)
https://www.macworld.com/article/222218/get-to-know-os-x-mav...
I felt like Mavericks had just the right amount of skeuomorphism. Not enough to be annoying but just enough to be aesthetic.
I was never a fan of the Metro flat design that took over, though admittedly my desktop now is a purposefully unsexy Sway desktop that is completely flat and I do like that.
I love this. Hopefully we start to see more experiments like this.
I like when designers are creative.
This is lovely. I really hope society returns to chasing beauty again. We need it.
But will this make a billion dollars and let me force my bizarre beliefs on the world?
Agreed. Greed is consuming everything before our eyes.
I see that this very bad idea is returning from the 90's.
I reckon a lot of the people clamoring for these things are gen z or younger first discovering the idea of customizable OS's and are now going through all the awful decisions that were made before. Pretty sure I've seen a version of this skeuomorphic desktop like 15 times at this point.
The children yearn for Microsoft Bob - which took this idea a bit further:
"Microsoft Bob presented screens showing a house, with rooms that the user could visit containing familiar objects corresponding to computer applications, such as a desk with pen and paper and a checkbook. Clicking on the pen and paper would open the system's word processor."
In the last century, there was an app for Apple's Mac OS (before MacOSX), called Kaleidoscope[0]. It allowed massive customization.
Fun, but most themes were basically unusable.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaleidoscope_(software)
Some samples: https://web.archive.org/web/20110709175639fw_/http://www.kal...
(The one I used the most, was Ozymandias II).
Some level of skeuomorphic design is quite nice, like what we saw from Apple during the Forstall era. It seemed to strike a good balance.
Something like Microsoft BOB takes the metaphor too far and gets weird.
I think this project leans on it a little too hard, but a balanced approach can make the systems quite charming and provide a nice juxtaposition to the very austere hardware we have these days.
Personally, I found skeuomorphic design to be something that I really enjoyed, for a couple of days, but rapidly got sick of.
That may have more to with the skills of the implementors, as opposed to the concept, as a whole.
I do find modern "flat" design to be less "fun," but I get a lot more done with it.
That might be the thing. In real life you don't use the same stationary for years. Your desk is a reflection of your mood and evolves almost daily. Maybe that's where these fail?
This is where themes come in.
Indeed, my mood most days is bland, monotonic, and flat, just like my desktop.
Why's it bad?
What's so bad about it?
He doesn't like it.
What a lovely project, going to try it later on a spare x230. I love to see a new floating window manager style, tiling is nice but floating too.
> DEsk is Desktop Environment and desk in one word
They dropped the ball:
DESk would have been Desktop Environment, desk, and Skeumorphic in one word.
Or go full acronym with Kit for the K as in "Developer Kit".
This reminds me of the Commodore 64 productivity software (on cartridge), Magic Desk:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Desk
> Windows are sheets of paper on a walnut desk.
The calculator is a sheet of paper..
The entire concept of skeuomorphism on computers is nonsensical. A monitor has a default blank grey or black appearance. EVERYTHING else is skeuomorphic, including the ugly 'modern' color rectangles the people who use this word want to exempt.
Flashback to TabWorks.
Compaq Presario 486 1994, I was 10.
And yes, played Myst on it.
Tempus fugit…
Did it have that tiny rollerball on the side?
We bought a bunch of TabWorks-based Compaqs back then for a medical office where I was doing IT work. I thought it was slick at the time.
And did it have a Quantum Bigfoot hdd in it that you could never use again because of its size?
I specifically remember having 420 MiB, dunno anything else.
Just mouse, bought a Logitech 3 button later.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Logitech_3_buttons_m...
This is neat, it’s not for me (I prefer extreme minimalism) but I could see how some would prefer it. I like how we’re getting more desktop options now thanks to wlroots.
Love skeuomorphism. This just gave me a reminder to build a paper-like calendar app now, with pencil markings showing events.
I definitely don't want a skeuomorphic desktop, but little web-apps, text editors, chat apps? I say we need a lot more of this type of design there, especially with how good modern CSS is at this kind of thing.
Sorry, that doesn't look like a walnut desk. That looks like stained pine wood.
Love this so much. I've been thinking of trying to represent my notes in a way like this where categories of material are "stored together" not in folders, but "physical" items that represent the category like a globe for travel notes or a bookshelves of movie reviews etc.
I always think about video game UI's when I read the skeuomorphic design arugments. I suspect video games use them, at the very least, because they are delightful and fun; which, in my opinion, is a good reason to do something anywhere.
I will say that a long time ago I installed enlightenment and after about 10 minutes the burning windows felt like they were getting in the way, so I guess, like everything, there should be balance.
the "paper windows" idea doesn't seem to have been done with as much soul as the rest of the ui. Just a turned up corner. I reckon something done there could really tie this together
A “dog-eared corner” in fact. The readme is painful to read if you have an aversion to Claude prose.
fwiw that is the standard term for that kind of fold (to the extent that it has its own wikipedia article), but I agree that the claude prose is gross.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_ears
I only skimmed the README, but I didn't notice any Claudisms.
I could read it comfortably, whereas usually I can't make it through even a paragraph from an LLM.
It's chock full of Claudisms!
> The room is ray-traced, and one desk lamp lights all of it.
> The first login draws the room once: a few seconds on a GPU, longer without one. After that it starts at once.
> Nothing here is a symbol for a thing on a desk.
> each is drawn to look like the real thing set down there
I could go on...
Fantastic. Giving me memories of MS Bob. Put a talking animal assistant in the corner and you’ve got it. Oh, and you could connect the assistant to an LLM of course.
Exactly what it reminded me of. Although a lot more functional.
But a lot less coherent personality. Bob had a somewhat coherent cartoon world aesthetic. This just looks like "TEMU Myst" to me.
Reminds me of the launcher I build in HyperCard when I was like 10 y/o. It consisted of some graphic of a desk an I could click different objects to run applications.
http://toastytech.com/guis/desk.html
I'd be into something as useful as Quartz Composer was for Desktop Widgets, but not a full skeuomorphic desktop.
Indigo Magic or CDE is as close as I'd want to go with that concept.
2004 was a long time ago, and I suppose what is old can be new (again).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQQPTtdzBig
This will be the chance of the Linux desktop to thrive.
In the past ui development was so hard and none of the app developers had the expertise or appetite to do it properly.
LLMs changed that overnight. A good engineer can build great UI for their app.
I thought we were done with the skeuomorphism craze back in the late 00s. (Thanks Apple). Is the trend coming back?
> Is the trend coming back?
Hopefully no.
Hopefully yes.
iPhone 4s with native resolution textures felt truly magical.
not this flat on flat, grey and text as buttons shite that has pervaded UI for the last decade+
This looks like something that heavily relies on a pointer device and thus is the opposite of what I want. But it can probably work well for people not minding this detail. Might even work better in VR.
UI design peaked with Motif Window Manager and has gone downhill ever since.
Amazing and beautiful, I love it! I'm working on something similar so it gives me ideas.
I think AR/XR glasses are going to start to become popular in the next couple of years and I think some mixed reality shells will have more physical/3d interfaces.
Do you want your desktop to feel like a 90s adventure mystery game by Sierra.. Well boy do I have the desktop for you!
HN crowd be like: THANKS GOD APPLE WILL NEVER OPEN-SOURCE THE DE SO WE CAN'T HAVE THEMES FOR INDIVIDUALS WHO WANTS THEM
themes are actually possible on macos
https://github.com/CoreBedtime/playground
I can imagine this being really helpful for beginners and kids. It's hard to grok what windows and tabs are etc. without any context.
This adds to a belief that I have that UI design undergoes cycles like fashion, just that we haven't yet seen a complete cycle.
This is pretty cool! I'd use this, once out of beta.
(Bonus points for not throwing AI-tells at everyone in the README - much appreciated).
Wrong abstraction! I love it… But wrong abstraction!
That control panel looks fantastic! Too bad I don't wayland. Last I checked, Mathematica doesn't like it.
Fun, makes me think of Bumptop :)
Wow, I remember having this on my Mac as a kid
Yes. I hope it lasts longer.
I love this, at least from the screenshots. I'll test it out tomorrow. I hope this kind of design makes a comeback.
This looks like peak skeuomorphism. I like it, but ray-tracing the desktop sounds like overkill.
How come the 'documents' are floating above the wood surface creating such deep drop shadows?
I can feel my shoulders unlocking looking at the screenshots.
nice! would be cool to customize to different era's of office life ... or even a creative version, e.g. Picasso's desktop
Looks like an 80s video game.
Welcome back, Microsoft Bob!
Now where's the Metro-inspired one?
fascinating, I recently was also exploring various skeuomorphic design pattern in Flutter and now this!
That's a no for me - it seems like it would be a bear to use for more then 5 minutes.
I'm not sure if I feel the same way about skeuomorphism as a general design philosophy. Maybe this is just the wrong metaphor?
memory 4 GB (DEsk itself 200-450 MB)
This makes it interesting. I may try it out. Moksha uses 200 MB to 300 MB of RAM
Love it. Maximize skeuomorphic design.
I am skeptical that a transition from X to Wayland is actually merited.
As for the post / the repo itself, this analysis:
https://www.salahadawi.com/hacker-news-ai-detector/50103338
suggests it is LLM-generated. Not sure what to make of it.
Skeuomorphic design was a solution to teaching the customer how to use the digital product, but I wish we have more of its side effects like shadows, icons that pop and other things that are pleasant for the eye and depth.
I don't know if it's just because it was better or am I just tired of the current white (like #FFFFFF white) backgrounds with everything flat and not connected. I would like my browser tabs to be in the shape of a physical tab in notebooks.
It feels like UI design froze somewhere in the mid-2010s. There are some changes here and there, but it all looks similar and very bland.
I don't know if this is accurate, but I blame Windows 8 and, especially, Windows 10 for popularizing this extremely bland and boring design.
BeOS of 2026?
Skeuomorphism should make my life easier. But sometimes it goes against that. I want to have a button that prints my document, I don't want to have to operate a virtual letter press. Having a switch to turn something on and off that looks like a switch helps me. A screen door that is the lock activation isn't what I would expect.
Please tell me it has coffee ring stains and spiral lined notebooks.
Coupled with steam frame headset this might be great experience.
Very interesting concept but I doubt it's stable due to the amount of slopped code and I don't like that it requires a hodgepoge of libraries from different DEs.
In Brett Victor's 2011 essay, "A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design", he laid out the foundation for his critique of skeuomorphic design. He believes hands are our future.
https://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDes...
On the visual pretense: "Pictures Under Glass sacrifice all the tactile richness of working with our hands, offering instead a hokey visual facade."
On touchscreens mimicking real objects without haptics: "Pictures Under Glass is an interaction paradigm of permanent numbness. It's a Novocaine drip to the wrist. It denies our hands what they do best."
On why this design path is short-sighted: "To me, claiming that Pictures Under Glass is the future of interaction is like claiming that black-and-white is the future of photography. It's obviously a transitional technology. And the sooner we transition, the better."
Yes! Please bring back the soul we had with retro OS GUIs (and the speed)... it's time for a resurgence. Especially with new systems/RAM/GPUs/etc. not being a thing for quite a while for a lot of people now.
Sweet
The thing I hate with vibed apps the most is zero seconds spend on how things around what is being build are already structured and what problems was already solved, just focusing on shiny result.
`sudo sh scripts/install_debian.sh`, a 583 lines long script, basically now a whole software just to handle the installation of this project on one distribution, seriously? If we vibecode already, just do the normal packaging.
okay, now use this for a month and report back
I don't hate skeuomorphic design but come on man
god please no
Please no, seriously, fuck skeumorphism. There's a reason everybody stopped using it.
Apple went back to it
This project highlights why designers hate skeuomorphism. Skeuomorphism looks tacky unless done very very well. Skeuomorphic design under Steve Jobs looked very good. This doesn't come close.
Personally I don't super care if a designer thinks I'm being tacky if its making my day to day more fun.