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 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.
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 with rendered with Phong.
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.
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 togetjer
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.bodhilinux.com/moksha-desktop/
> The room is ray-traced
imho, part of the charm of iOS6 was that everything was baked into native-resolution textures.
It's hardly even skeuomorphism, it's a almost digital twin with rendered with Phong.
[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50082470
[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50094994
The calculator is a sheet of paper..
This makes it interesting. I may try it out. Moksha uses 200 MB to 300 MB of RAM
Compaq Presario 486 1994, I was 10.
And yes, played Myst on it.
Tempus fugit…
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_ears
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.
Fun, but most themes were basically unusable.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaleidoscope_(software)
I don't hate skeuomorphic design but come on man