Sounds like you fundamentally misunderstand the thing people have against using AI for these pursuits. If your imagination or capability needed LLMs in order to unlock their full potential (as in, if you waited until AI removed the barriers between a beginner and their future craft), maybe your potential wasn't that great to begin with. And all you're doing is producing things closer to the median, instead of somewhere toward one end of a bell curve.
"Your potential" is part of a greater fairy tale told to gifted students to make them contribute significantly more to society at the cost of their mental health, especially when the promised rewards never materialize.
In this case it's not a context menu, it's just a menu. User experience is degraded, see GP's case. There is an expectation and a common paradigm which is intentionally ignored because the OS developers thought they knew better than the users.
This reminds me of frequent conversations with other developers when presented with a bug report. "That's not a bug, it's working as intended." The intention is wrong, then -- the bug is in the design, not the code, but it's still a bug.
Not working for your particular preferences isn’t a bug; your preferences are just wrong for the vast majority of users.
The hubris of HN posters never fails to astound me. The most niche of workflows, then wonders why regular users don’t all learn esoteric keybindings and use TUIs.
I don't know if this is aimed at me or not. I don't use this workflow; in fact I'm pretty bog-standard in many of the ways I use my computers. In any case, I don't see how expecting to be able to bring up a context menu is in any way esoteric. We're in a thread about navigating GUIs using a keyboard. On many keyboards there's literally a key dedicated to opening a context menu, and on most OSs there's a pretty standard shortcut to do it as well, which is what GP was talking about and what sibling comments discuss being added more recently in MacOS. So, again, not very esoteric.
I also don't see how trying to emphasize empathy toward users translates to hubris. But sounds like you've got a bone to pick, so keep picking I guess.
I’m really curious how many people run this kind of skin unironically. Unironically here means they’d actively seek out to make their desktop OS look… 30 years old?
No shade at all, just curios.
I def have all kinds of warm feelings towards the moment I first installed W ‘95 but wow I can’t imagine having that UX as my daily OS today.
If I were to transition my 70yo mum from Windows to Linux, the first thing I'd do would be to add such a skin. Yes, there will be differences, but the value of re-injecting some familiarity with the fundamentals cannot be underestimated. She already hates anything post-XP and would probably be delighted to go back.
A few years back I threw Mint plus this theme on my old Thinkpad T430s. My intent was to use it for one thing and one thing only: writing. The theme helped me trick myself into thinking the machine was unusable for anything else.
I don't run this kind of skin unironically but I do think that desktop GUIs used to be a lot more intuitive in some ways. They were still educating PC users on how to use PCs and so there was less of a temptation to hide features and smooth things out for the sake of pure aesthetics.
(The slide-to-unlock on the original iPhone OS comes to mind as an analogy on the phone: babies could figure it out, but by iOS 7 they figured enough people knew how to unlock that they could make it less obvious.)
I absolutely agree that the interfaces up until 2005s and, in case of Mac, early 2010s or so were better in terms of usability, but somehow it’s hard to imagine coming back there from the modern UIs with all their shadows and transparencies and such.
There has to be a middle ground somewhere in this.
>I’m really curious how many people run this kind of skin unironically
Most avoid gimmick Windows/MacOS themes, as they know these tend to be unmaintainable over the long-term.
Keep in mind most Linux desktop options tend to be power-user focused, high contrast for outdoor use, and eye candy entertainment options just waste peoples time. =3
In every part of Thailand I've been to outside BKK, there's a gas station almost every few kilometers on every major road. Almost every gas station has a public restroom that's open 24/7, unattended. The ones that don't have a public restroom are typically right next to a string of restaurants that have a restroom you can use during the day for free if you ask.
For the most part, yes, but I've gone much longer stretches without seeing a gas station in the US. To be fair, there's also no point in building gas stations at regular intervals in the desert or the many other long stretches of nothing across much of the country.
I've driven from Mukdahan to Kanchanaburi to Trang provinces so my experience is not centered around the major cities at all. I don't know what poor luck or exotic adventures you may have had, but I never once struggled to find a bathroom.
I mean, Raymond Chen has been writing The Old New Thing consistently for over 20 years. Nearly every single entry is interesting, informative, and illuminating, aimed at every facet of software engineering, old and new, over the decades. He may be part of the final bastion of quality and care for detail at MS, dwindling and faint as it is.
Windows doesn't need or deserve defending. It's atrocious. But this is a silly comment.
It's not that hard if you put in the effort and practice.
But if you don't want to and still want to use an LLM, there are low-bar choices you can make (using a technical writing skill, using ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English, choosing your audience, proofreading at the end with human eyes to make sure it makes sense and doesn't repeat itself uselessly).
I think it shows either a) low respect or consideration for your audience or yourself, or b) laziness.
Trust yourself to write even if it's bad. At least it's human.
I assure you it won't be as bad as this (answer to FAQ: "Will OpenLogi support Logitech Flow?")
> It's on the roadmap, at the far end: a cross-computer pointer and clipboard bridge is a very large feature. The half that lives in the protocol already ships. OpenLogi drives Easy-Switch host switching over HID++ (0x1814/0x1815), and paired mice follow the keyboard when it switches hosts. If the rest lands, it will be opt-in and local-network only.
A great example of why Claude's writing is terrible is the sentence "The half that lives in the protocol already ships". I cannot imagine any human writing this.
Yeah, a lot of non-visual components still require (or want) you to drag-and-drop them in the builder and edit many or most properties there. It's a weird thing to adjust to, and it often leads to a very cluttered view if you have a lot of them. Conversely, a cluttered view with a ton of non-visual components can be a very easy-to-spot signal that you might be trying to do too much in one screen.
The RAD environment makes it insanely quick and easy to throw together a reasonably functional desktop app. Think WinForms on steroids. For all its age and the many cracks and seams, it's still very fast, easy for beginners and pros alike, and the final executable is a single tiny file (usually)
I really find it mind blowing nothing else from what I've seen has really replicated it. Qt does an alright job but everything just seems to take 50% more effort to get it do the same.
Sadly it was a very lousy port, if I remember correctly instead of properly supporting Linux, they used Wine to make it work, thus it had quite a few issues.
Secondly, it was trying to sell developer tools to a community that rather spend one month coding an alternative than pay regardless if it is a Starbucks XL cappuccino they would be losing.
> if I remember correctly instead of properly supporting Linux, they used Wine to make it work, thus it had quite a few issues
Only the IDE was using wine, the deployed applications were native. But the IDE was a bit annoying because of that.
> Secondly, it was trying to sell developer tools to a community that rather spend one month coding an alternative than pay regardless if it is a Starbucks XL cappuccino they would be losing.
You forget, it was after Borland renamed itself to Inprise and wasted all their cash on UML diagram software and other enterprise stuff. So it's not a Starbucks XL cappucino, it's more like a truckload of those.
Also they sold it separately from Delphi, so you ended up paying twice to do cross platform development. It started at 2 x 1k, i think. So 550 to 600 Starbucks XL cappucinos at 2001 pricing.
Besides Starbucks is overpriced, so maybe 900 great coffees from that noname place you accidentally found out about...
Yes, I am quite aware that Kylix price wasn't a cappuccino XL, however the point was that it would not have helped even if it was, given the prevalent culture.
The first version I used was one of the previews, where the IDE didn't actually work and all the code was compiled from the command line. Kylix 1.0 was "okay", but it quickly became impossible to use because Linux moved on.
The one I thought was bad was the .Net port. Delphi.Net never really got past version 1.0 of the .Net framework because, and this is anecdotal, I heard the compiler abused something in the metadata system that .Net 2.0 no longer allowed and the compiler jus stopped being able to build valid assemblies. They literally wouldn't work anymore because the class loader wouldn't load them under .Net 2.0. If you know anything about .Net, tis is pretty fundamentally poor engineering, because .Net runtimes almost always can load older framework code with the right components installed.
I played with the first, somewhat buggy version and what I remember very vividly was that they introduced a second version (and charged for it) without fixing the first one.
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