Fuck this is quintessential enshittificaction of modern interface
this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2026
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The hamburger menu, the account picker and the huge share pill, they all look exactly like that!
Congrats OP this meme actually annoyed me π
Yesterday describing how to do a thing to my wife over the phone "The menu button" "There is no menu button" "It's a hamburger icon" "What?" "3 lines" "How is that a menu?"
Apple Incorporatedβs software looks more like the one on the left, but with a way more refined user interfaceβ¦ If we want OSS to be as good as possible then we need to compare our favorite software with other good software, not with Microslop. UI design matters and we should discuss it with less of a bias.
I've been seeing more and more ~~open source~~ disclosed source software that fits the category on the right...
We tend to forget that the design on the left was the corporate ux language for a long time. Open source is just slower to fall for the trends, but they fall eventually.
Word
Needs more indiscernible buttons on the left with a bunch of nested menus
Yet both should learn from each other.
The FOSS world needs more UX/UI specialists.
Personally I think a lot of FOSS maintainers are burning out. If you maintain a remotely popular project you basically have a second unpaid job.
No.
The FOSS world needs more UX/UI specialists.
Or even just hobbyistsβ¦
Donate to your favorite project.
It depends on several things which is preferable, at the end it's depends on the intentions and ethics of the author respect the user, on the other hand questionable in case of products (often also FOSS) from big corps where ethics respect the user are too often secundary. To say "OpenSource is always good and Proprietary crap" is a big mistake
A good article
But the icons are so much prettier on the right!
/s
And would you look at all that beautiful whitespace!
"Make the best software we can" vs "Make the most money we can"
Valid on both side, honest soft and services vs which are not, the worst malware is mostly FOSS which you can find in the onion. Also nowadays the biggest FOSS catalogue is by Google Labs and Microsoft, FOSS to make money. There are others, like the famose Irfanview, free proprietary soft and absolute trustworth and definitively the best which you can find, there don't exist a real OpenSource alternative.
Absolutely - anything can have more than one objective. But when money is an objective, the one constant is that it changes what it affects. Sometimes better in some ways, sometimes worse.
Sport is a good analogy here, I think. Amateur sport has little impact beyond those directly involved. Adding money increases exposure of those sports, better facilities, lots of scope for good - and yet big money sports are also very often mired in corruption and greed. (FIFA being a timely example) Those base human behaviours never go away.
FIFA is simply a money wash engine, nothing to do with sport.
It has gone the same way as physical goods. My parents still have appliances (food mixers things like that) that still work and they bought them in the 1980s. Good luck getting anything to last that long these days.
I'm sorry to say this, but this is survivorship bias. We produced plenty of crap that broke a few months after use even 50 years ago, it's just that you don't notice the crap because it was thrown away after it broke and all you see now is the stuff that surprisingly made it for decades. That's not to say that enshittification and planned obsolescence is not a thing, it's just not as extreme and "we used to build things that lasted" as people would like to believe.
It is true that merely from the observation of old things, you cannot conclude that all things lasted long.
But as a matter of fact, from different observations by many people and areas, mid- to high- end stuff really lasted much, much longer. It was as an average rule more simple, less compact, and it lasted and still lasts really long without degradation.
There's also maintenance blindness. It is easy to see how something lasted forever, when you weren't the one doing the maintenance and repair work everyday. Also, many "good ol' immortal appliances" neglect to mention how most of the parts are actually brand new or it wouldn't be functional otherwise.
The ability to replace parts is part of why they last so long
If you say so
To be fair the left part also once was "Software, by corporation" (i.e. Photoshop CS and prior)
Yeah, they needed to capture a user base first and only then start enshittifying. This is what they always do - in software, hardware and other products & services
That's inevitable enshittification.
So true. I don't miss the "subscribe to be able to write a page of text" lifestyle.