I got reminded today that one of the things I truly hate in desktop environments is: animations.
Stop trying to grab my attention, dammit!
No, I do not want windows to fade in and out, or riffle like a deck of cards, distort into a crescent while they get sucked into the dock, or whatever other cute effect some UX designer thought up this week. Just no.
I’m sitting at my machine to work on something. I’m concentrating. I’m a human with a Mark I meat-brain, so my flow state is fragile. When I tell my interface to do a state change, I want it to go fast and clean, not razzle-dazzle at me in a way that risks breaking my concentration.
Actionable advice for people designing desktop environments: I get it about the eye candy, it’s marketing. All I’m saying is, have a freaking OFF switch? Give me a way to shut all that distracting shit right down.
Cosmic Desktop, which I’ve truly loved ever since I started using the alpha, doesn’t have animations. The roadmap mutters about adding them in a future release. I’m going to be very sad if they are mandatory.
To sharpen the point about distraction, let me talk about a fancy new-school desktop-environment hack that I do like; the ability to set a translucency level on terminal windows and docks and things.
I tried setting translucency on my terminal background. At first, it looked pretty over the deep-sky astronomical photograph that Cosmic uses as a default background (and which matches my taste — I’ve been using a collection of similar deep sky photographs as backgrounds for many years). But it got old after about five minutes; when I’m reading text, and my eyes trip over a detail in the background, that’s distracting.
On the other hand, I really like being able to set translucency on my application dock. I can mouse up and pop up the dock to select an application without losing visual continuity with whatever is going on under the translucency. That is anti-distractive.
I want my whole environment to be anti-distractive. Pretty is nice when I have the bandwidth to notice it on my own (yes, Cosmic I do like your default dark mode with neon-blue piping), but the moment an interface design tugs on my sleeve to say “look how cool I am!”, that’s when I reach for my revolver.
ESR, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2026-05-19.
August 27, 2026
QotD: Useless and irritating computer tricks
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