I never thought trendy modern GUI design would get so bad that looking at screenshots of programs running on Windows 98 would feel instantly and overwhelmingly relaxing, like settling into a warm bath, as if parts of my brain being taxed for no reason could finally just chill. Yet, here we are.

One of the arguments by Designers is that they make the UI more approachable - they don't realize that they are biased by their personal aesthetic taste, their friends like the same type of flat sleek modern UI designs, and they like going to minimal galleries, subscribe to itsnotthat and read the colossal blog.

This is a cultural imposition, not something a professional would do. Yet, we have modern designers injecting their personal taste of modernism into UIs, in this case, Github developers are not the average Joe - they are familiar with complexity, highly dense information screens (code!) and don't need any of this non-sense.

Non-designers I've met actually have a better more grounded and functional approach to design, which is what I think design is. Yet the general opinion amongst designers is that the engineers are like Milton from Office Space - they don't understand fashion, current trends and aesthetics.

True story: my dad is confused by basically all technology and all modern user interfaces. The one site he finds usable without assistance? Craigslist.

On the contrary, my parents were never able to use texting on old mobile phones or even 2013-era smartphones. but now they easily are able to do video-calls, voice-calls on today's smartphones and apps.

They are also able to make payments using code scanning and normal transfer through the ease to use interface.

And this is in Myanmar, where we barely had internet for public use 10 years ago.

Craigslist is the epitome of simplicity. It may not be pretty, but it does what it is supposed to and nothing more.

This practice should be applied universally throughout our lives in every field, perhaps except Art where creativity is revered and the avant-garde prevail.

The appeal is that they need something on-trend to put in their portfolios for career advancement. It's their version of résumé-driven development. Project managers have similar incentives (screenshots are very powerful, in many settings) so at least don't stop them, if not actually encouraging them.

Oh is that what it is? I was trying to figure out why it looked so bad when not zoomed uncomfortably far "in", when I didn't recall that ever being a problem before. I think that's it.

Ugh now I can't un-see how much farther it is to mouse from the repo "body" to menu items (including those associated with the repo, which are now, confusingly, disconnected from it visually) now. Thanks for that.

> My hypothesis is the point is to compete with Jira.

When they start making everything drag & droppable at a huge cost to UI latency and bundle size (plus, for some reason, idle resource use), we'll know for sure that's what they're doing.

Oh man, they've made it way harder to quickly evaluate the state of a repo, which has always (for me) been about 90% of the appeal of Github. Moving releases out of the tab list hurts, too.

Does it also feel "heavier"/slower to anyone else? Like there's more JS running or something? That'd already gotten a little worse but I hope it's not trending even farther into feeling "webappy". Ew.

> How are you managing to break apt not once, but "way too many times?"

Raises hand my home server (running Debian) is currently in a weird state where a whole bunch of packages won't install or update because some library's stuck on a version they don't like. The version they want isn't available. I'm pretty sure I haven't even added any nonstandard repos to it (all it really runs is docker, so anything odd comes in as a docker container rather than a system package—this in part because I don't trust Linux package managers not to break my system when installing non-critical software due to long experience of same happening over and over, go figure). I'm not sure what I did to cause it and it's still running Docker fine so my incentive to spend an hour tracking down and fixing whatever-it-is has been zero—I'm just glad it's not a system I depend on for anything serious or need to really do anything with.

I spent a few years running Gentoo as my main machine in the 00s. On a laptop. Got suspend-to-disk working, even. I had to manually install Grub on this same Debian home server when I built it last yer, in a chroot to my newly-installed system, because the installer kept failing to do it (my process to fix it was very ordinary and encountered no problems, AFAIK, so I still don't know why the Debian installer couldn't do it, I've never seen it fail quite that way before, but it did so repeatedly so I had to give up and open up the engine, as it were). So I'm not entirely clueless.

Nonetheless I don't really feel confident using a Linux desktop I can't snapshot for emergency rollbacks or rebuild in a few minutes from a script, because damned if weird problems don't crop up when you upgrade. Or don't upgrade. Or reboot, forgetting you'd installed (through the blessed package manager!) a new kernel and now it can't read your encrypted root anymore so is unbootable and now you get to spend some time figuring that out. And so on.

I feel no such anxiety on macOS. Not that that it never breaks, but it's rare enough I don't worry about it. FWIW I'm back on desktop Linux now due to Macs' insane prices, but I suspect I made a mistake and the time I've already lost would have made spending an extra $500 on a significantly worse-spec'd machine well worth it. It's a little here, a little there, but it adds up.

Fwiw, I actually manage my linux laptop with Ansible.

> I will not be migrating from Mojave to Catalina, and will use my current generation of Macs until they are obsolete, while finally making the transition to Linux

I've recently been doing this, after some time (ahem, a decade) away from "serious" desktop Linux. Some observations/pointers:

- Running ultralight window managers with minimal services still feels the most "right" and predictable/stable way to have a Linux GUI. So that hasn't changed. Unfortunately this means manually screwing around with scaling and size problems on 4K displays now. Like, really weird stuff like various windows being drawn at different scales or part-scaled-part-not and drawing your cursor a different size when you mouseover. It's no fun sorting all that out. Boo.

- Wayland is less horrible than I expected but does give the impression of being a lovely new way for any ordinary application to crash your entire windowing system. As if Linux didn't have enough of those already.

- It's still easier and more predictable to just run the damn thing in a Virtualbox VM under Windows, if you've got the horsepower for it, letting Windows handle the drivers for the actual-real-hardware. This may not be true on stuff like System76 or oldish Lenovo machines or something, but probably is if you've got, say, a dedicated recent-vintage graphics card, unusual USB devices, anything like that. It's just way less crashy in a VM, on the same hardware, unless you're damn lucky and probably running fairly old kit. Was true in 2010. Still is, it seems.

- Gnome3 has gotten so incredibly resource-hungry and unstable that it's finally driven me to KDE (see above about handling scaling issues in the lighter WMs being a PITA for why I'm not in Awesome or XFCE or something), which is a DE I've never liked since I first tried it two decades ago. It is a little better now, admittedly, and doesn't make me feel ashamed or like I'm Doing It Wrong for not running exclusively K* applications like it used to. The settings panels are still some kind of bad joke, organizationally. It's not that there are too many options, it's that they're trollishly organized. Friggin' gnome-shell. What an absolute garbage fire. Which is a shame because aside from being even harder to customize meaningfully than macOS (!) Gnome3 looks fairly pretty. It's seriously, no joke, awful though. I wish I could use it but it's simply broken, at present.

- All the new packaging stuff I've tried sucks. AppImage is closest to being good but it's exactly as good as having a bare exe file on Windows or downloading a static binary on Linux, so... it's fine, but does nothing for you like adding console launch commands ("code ." for example) or configuring your environment, as far as I can tell. None are as good as Homebrew and Homebrew-Cask (yes it's on Linux but there are way fewer eyeballs on it so fewer packages and they're often broken) for managing user-, not system-level packages. Snap's complete crap, like, they should just give up, it seems irredeemable at this point. Flatpack is significantly better but still not great. Usable for some unimportant things if you don't mind them doing weird, broken stuff sometimes or just not working when you need them to (see again: unimportant things)

Incidentally, I've settled (back) on Debian after trying Fedora 32 due to tons of recommendations on Reddit (I... did not enjoy the experience) and already knowing I didn't care for Ubuntu (anymore—it was great in the late 00s) as I'd tried that in VMs a few times during my Linux hiatus and not liked it. I also toyed with Void Linux on a crappy little machine for a while and damn is it nice for low-end hardware. I tried Manjaro but I-forget-what serious thing was broken about it on my rig and was going to be a pain to fix. Great installer, though. 10/10 on that.

Thanks for the great tips! I’m not super thrilled at the idea of running Linux on Windows, though that may be the best option. It would be nice to have more games available, but I find using Windows a grating experience with its constant popups and annoyances. It’s a thousand little things that annoy the heck out of me when using it. I had a Windows work box for 3.5 years and the only nice things I have to say for it we’re Outlook, Excel, and SSMS, which are fine products.

Strongly agreed, I haven't even kinda liked Windows since Win7. Still, it's not as bad as the constant oops-rebooted-there-goes-your-work fest I recall from early Win10. I forget it's there most of the time, until I suspend my work VM and fire up Steam for some games.

I don't really trust a ZFS root on Linux not to, you know, suddenly break in ways that keep it from booting up, so absent that the snapshotting you can do for your whole OS when it's running in a VM is very handy, too. Though of course you could do that with any OS playing host—Windows is just convenient as the best driver shim available on generic x86 hardware, really. Takes a bunch of the headaches out. "I want to upgrade this, will my Linux installation become way less stable if I do?"—who cares, it sees what VBox shows it.

The fluidity is about keeping activity on the screen tightly in sync with motion on the trackpad and having zero or no unexpected behavior or jank when e.g. reversing a motion partway through to undo it (say, starting to slide three fingers up to expose all your windows, stopping to peak at something, then sliding them back down to put everything back where it was—you can even stop in the middle of it to make the windows do a little dance and nothing goes badly wrong or far out of sync). It nails that stuff even on my aging low-specs-even-at-the-time 2013 MBP. It's not so much about raw UI speed which, yes, light Linux/BSD window managers still hold the crown for (outside dead or niche operating systems like BeOS and QNX or maybe even old versions of Windows, which actually hold the crown)

BeOS lives on in Haiku (https://www.haiku-os.org/) which is both still alive, and blows most "light Linux window managers" out of the water in UI speed. :)

I have a VM with Haiku and I can confirm it is indeed very fast.

I am no Haiku expert but the Haiku's window manager does not support window composition and does not use GPU acceleration, right? It is also not modular and cannot be replaced.

You can disable composition on XFWM and make it run a little faster on lower spec hardware. You can also use a WM like i3, Windowmaker or Enlightment.

IMO, XFWM is the right balance between functionality and performance.

The whole point of Haiku is a holistic approach to system design, so no, you cannot easily replace the window manager. You can, however, write "decorator" plugins which draw different window borders, write shortcut plugins for "tiling", etc.

It indeed does not use GPU acceleration; Haiku as a whole does not have 3D drivers either (but there are plans.)

Once saw a police car in a smallish town whip a u-turn for no clear reason, no lights, nothing, nearly hit a car that was pulling out of a bank parking lot and the driver of which had clearly already looked that way and seen no-one coming, then the cop freaked out, u-turned again (lights this time) and pulled over the car they nearly hit. Guess whatever they were breaking traffic laws and driving very dangerously to get to wasn't so important after all. What a shitty day for that person. At least it was probably just a totally unjustified ticket and an unpleasant lies-filled conversation with an upset and fragile-ego'd cop, and not death or injury, I suppose.

[EDIT] this and other dangerous-driving observations lead me to treat cop cars on the road like someone I've seen through the window drinking a 40 while talking on the phone. They're far and away the most likely category of vehicle to do something batshit crazy with no warning.

I've seen a lot of talk about how a police officer's job isn't particularly dangerous, with less chance of dying on the job than say a garbageman or taxi driver.

An angle I don't see mentioned quite so often is that for the danger that does exist, most of it is vehicle crash related. One wonders how much is self inflicted due to dangerous driving.

A friends was rear ended by a police cruiser while stopped at a red light. Ten police cars showed up. They did everything in their power to find anything wrong. They photographed everything in the car. They intimidated her into saying something was her fault.

She never got the money to repair her car because they don't carry insurance the same way normal people do. She ended up buying a new car. She was lucky to not be put in jail.

It's hard to imagine there are any good cops out there with all this rot.

Absolutely. I'm a firefighter. I was the designated driver for two friends. We leave a bar, and I pull up to the intersection. I have a flashing red traffic light, and the cross traffic has a flashing yellow. There is a police car sitting at his flashing yellow, windows down, watching (it's closing time, and there are several people milling about on the street, the usual). I wait. He doesn't move. I wait for approximately 10 seconds before turning, with my signal, left.

I'm immediately lit up. "Failure to yield". In addition I get an FST after "failing" the vertical nystagmus test (bear in mind at this point, my one and only pint of beer is coming up on five hours old). Cop is insistent I'm drunk, says he can go the DUI route, because my "behavior" in "failing to yield" shows I'm impaired, regardless of actual numbers. I'm lucid, but frustrated. Debates merits of blood draw, etc. Tickets me, "Get out of downtown and get home, I think we both know you're getting off lucky".

Hahaha, yeah, same smallish town's cops love to hassle people with late or early shifts playing "20 questions" fishing for drunks or I-don't-even-know-what ("5:30's awfully early to be going to work" look, asshole, take it up with the hour-fifteen of highway I have to cover, how many drunks are you nabbing at this hour on a Tuesday anyway?), usually just obviously fabricating some reason that they stopped you in the first place, without even trying to hide that it's BS (good luck questioning it, though). That's white folks, too, I can't imagine how bad it is there if you've got too much melanin in your skin. Incredibly annoying. Often it just seems like they're super bored and looking for anything at all to do.

Hey, it's me a couple months ago! With a side dose of "we may or may not fire you, we dunno yet" for several weeks (they did, abruptly, the day after once again saying they maybe wouldn't, and I guess I'll never know exactly why). Confusing as hell and unlike anything I'd experienced in my not-short career. I guess some managers/teams are straight-up incompetent at onboarding and blind to how hostile-to-new-hires their codebase(s) and docs are. Oh and useless, god-awful justify-your-existence-to-your-manager (then tune out because nothing anyone else says matters) standups every day adding to the stress. And no planning process to speak of. It's the second time in my life I've felt actually-mentally-ill and the other involved a sick newborn, so. That's impressive for them to have achieved, I guess.

Save money if you can and look for cheap/free credit lines, is my advice. If you can get a few months' worth of bills in the bank or available on super-cheap credit then the worst-case (shit, best-case, for me—I felt so much better after) scenario won't really be that bad. Hit up your network if you can and see if anyone needs some contract work, if things don't work out. It's pretty easy to scare up a few hours here and there, maybe enough to at least cover bills.

I have savings but I’d rather see the problems with my current job fixed rather than bailing out. I don’t think they’re intractable, just that the experience is a bit painful.