[Info-vax] GUI designs

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

On Thu, 4 Jan 2024 13:35:14 -0000 (UTC), Simon Clubley wrote:

> On 2024-01-03, John Dallman <jgd at cix.co.uk> wrote:
>>
>> Me, I regarded Windows 2000 as the peak of their GUI design, and it's
>> been getting worse, on average, ever since.
>>
> Unfortunately, that seems to be the case with modern GUI designs in
> general.
> 
> For example, compare the disaster that is GTK4 with the much cleaner
> GTK2 ...

Notice what you are comparing here: on the one hand, two different OS 
versions, on the other hand, two different versions of a GUI toolkit that 
lives entirely in userland.

In the first case, you can only change the GUI by entirely replacing the 
OS. In the latter case, it’s just a matter of choosing different packages 
to install. In fact, the common Linux distros continue to offer GUI 
packages based on all three versions of GTK from GTK2 onwards, so 
switching between them is a simple matter of logging out of one and 
logging back into another.