{"id":89313,"date":"2025-05-14T01:00:10","date_gmt":"2025-05-14T05:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=89313"},"modified":"2025-05-13T08:52:04","modified_gmt":"2025-05-13T12:52:04","slug":"qotd-to-hell-with-visual-distractions-on-your-desktop-gui","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2025\/05\/14\/qotd-to-hell-with-visual-distractions-on-your-desktop-gui\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: To hell with visual distractions on your desktop GUI"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Even that 1990s desktop is too frou-frou for me now, let alone the excessively cute GUIs that replaced it.<\/p>\n

My desktop layout doesn’t have a background, or icons, or action buttons, or gradients, or any of that crap. It barely even has color.<\/p>\n

I’m not going to name my window manager here, because I don’t want to sound like I’m evangelizing for a particular one. The important part is that it’s all tiled windows all the way down with an absolute minimum of dead space and visual noise.<\/p>\n

And I am so much happier than I was with conventional desktop GUIs. I love not having that visual noise constantly pull at my attention.<\/p>\n

In hindsight, we spent decades being obsessed with UI details that were just meaningless, distracting fluff. That not only didn’t help us get work done, they were actually a drain on our concentration. <\/p>\n

Only part of that can be blamed on pixel-pushing “UX” designers who got erections every time they changed the color or shape of a button. The rest of it’s on us, on people who bought into this glittery fake progress. I used to be guilty of this myself, but I’ve learned better.<\/p>\n

Fancy visually-noisy desktop GUIs that suck your attention are the enemy. Fuck all that sideways with a chainsaw. Go simple, go tiled, go minimalist — stop abusing your brain!<\/p>\n

Eric S. Raymond, Twitter<\/em><\/a>, 2024-05-28.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Even that 1990s desktop is too frou-frou for me now, let alone the excessively cute GUIs that replaced it. My desktop layout doesn’t have a background, or icons, or action buttons, or gradients, or any of that crap. It barely even has color. I’m not going to name my window manager here, because I don’t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,41,15],"tags":[109,140,1235,92],"class_list":["post-89313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-quotations","category-technology","tag-computers","tag-design","tag-esr","tag-software"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-nex","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89313","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=89313"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89313\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":95601,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89313\/revisions\/95601"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=89313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=89313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=89313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}