20240902-wimps.txt
I've likely bloviated on the needless complexity of many UIs,
especially GUIs. But it still astounds me how many devs are creating
solutions looking for a problem.

It should come as no shock to people who have been reading my goofy
rants that when I use a GUI in GNU/Linux, I use DWM by Suckless. It's
so simple and lightweight. It does almost everything I need it to do.
The only things it lacks is a volume daemon (not really in WM
territory, anyway) and a built-in status. It has an area for it, which
is a plus.

Anyway, recently I'd heard rumblings about this thing called Hyprland.
I went and looked it up. It's yet another tiling window manager, but
it's a fat one (relatively) that generally requires a lot of config
tampering (granted vanilla DWM is pretty lame). But it has tons of
add-ons/extensions, and even config files. Why do you need multiple
config files for a window manager? You just have to divvy up the color
palette from the animation config? Wait, you need animations?

While I agree that animations look cool, in terms of productivity,
they're almost useless. They just provide a visible delay and are
there just to look pretty and arguably distract from the task at hand.
There are times when animation is useful (like loading), but often
they're false positives (I especially hate the "loading" gifs that
just spin because you have JS disabled and the geniuses didn't put a
noscript on the page). A few times on Android it would have been
slightly less confusing ("thinking" animations are valid), but stuff
like window animations or wobbly window borders while you're dragging
them are just gimmicks to me.

Anyway, I looked at Hyprland and as usual there were some people
proclaiming it was the best thing ever. It looks like a more
convoluted version of any WM I've ever tried. Why is this great? Oh,
you've never used a tiler? That explains a lot.

It's just confusing to me why people get excited over the dumbest
shit. Yes, Hyprland being a tiler automatically puts it above a bunch
of DEs and WMs... That doesn't make it great. You know what else is
better than the things Hyprland is better than? Every other tiler. I
mean I'm not a fan if i3m(?) where the "start" menu is a right click
and the desktop looks like a stuck slideshow, but come on. Did we
really need another tiler? No. We did not. This kind of fragmentation
just doesn't compute for me. It's like a complicated tiler for people
who want complicated workflows. It's for WIMPs: windows, icons, menus,
and pointer users (although it certainly has keyboard navigation).

I just don't understand the hype. Granted I still feel relatively new
to the GNU/Linux scene (less than a decade, anyway), but it still
baffles me about what GNU/Linux users get positively excited.

One good thing about DEs in GNU/Linux is it makes the transition from
Win10 and Win11 easier. Speaking of WIMPs, I've run into more and more
Win users that prefer to use PowerHell than the GUI because MS has
nuked the GUI method of changing basic settings into a wasteland. It's
fucking sad. Settings is a shitty replacement for Control Panel and
they STILL haven't figured out how to migrate every setting from
CPanel to Settings. Granted Settings itself is entirely redundant
anyway, but you could literally just tweak the CPanel UI and have it
work like a better Settings app. I can understand the elegance of a
consistent theme (which CPanel breaks by looking like XP just invaded
the screen), but come on, guys.

GNU/Linux's market share has been rising a lot recently. It's
incredible to me that now ~5% of PC users use GNU/Linux. MS fucked up
that badly and Rotten Core is such a shitshow that thousands if not
millions of people would rather learn a brand new OS than use either
of their products. Something as "unintuitive" as GNU/Linux is
perceived is more palatable than the titan MS Win and the lame
alternative Mac.

Don't be a wimp. Use a TUI or CLI and see just why folks who know what
they're doing use them when they are available.