[notbeuller]

So many, many rants could come from this and my blood is boiling in fervent agreement. But two thoughts: as hard as it is to use the contrast-less, contextless obscure icons and "is it checked or toggled or active", try working with someone and having to explain "click that thing, I don't know what it is, no, the other one, to the left, arghghhg."

But really, maybe these aren't our interfaces anymore - the lack of scrollbars on macOS is because of the touch, pinch and swipe touch interfaces, and the people that are now very happily consuming content (and creating, although less so) without having to worry about that extra bit of information. But the rest of us suffer, and the "increase contrast" and "reduce motion" checkboxes don't do nearly enough to reconfigure the UI.

I never really appreciated the Mac modding community[1] (kaleidoscope?) and the powerful frameworks they had to build UIs, 90% of which I'd happily switch to today if I could.

[1] https://botsin.space/@osxthemes/111416576638238992

[Miiko]

> lack of scrollbars on macOS

Do you know that you can tell your Mac to "always show scroll bars" on System Settings -> Appearance page?

Anyway, while I tend to agree that Snow Leopard UI was the best and it went downhill since then, the latest macOS is still very usable and I do not suffer on Mac at all (unlike Windows 11, where I had to install a 3rd party app to at least partially revert what they did with UI)

[bigstrat2003]

Sadly the UI isn't even the worst part of Windows these days. It's the ads. It's beyond belief that I should get ads in software that I paid for, yet here we are. I got so sick of it that I switched to daily driving Linux. It's not perfect (I'm a gamer and games can have issues even though they mostly work great), but at least I don't have ads on my desktop.

[shiroiuma]

Microsoft did the right thing in putting ads on the Windows desktop. They can make more money that way, and increase shareholder value.

For every user like you that gets angry and switches to Linux, there's countless others that don't, and MS makes more profit showing them annoying ads, so it's a net gain for them.

[JohnFen]

I think that you hit on one of the major things that leads to modern UIs being horrible: products seem to want to have a single UI for all form factors and types of users.

However, every form factor has a unique set on constraints, and a casual user has a different set of needs from a non-casual user. It's simply impossible for one UI to serve all of these things adequately.

So we end up with user interfaces that suck in every use case, just in different ways for different use cases. We need to go back to the days when user interfaces were actually tailored to the use case.