[hjkl0]

This is just a rant about some minor usability issues in a very small selection of applications used by the author, and mostly Gnome. There’s is nothing behind it.

The title is click-bait and the article is a waste of time.

There’s some very dubious claims, such as:

> There was a time (roughly between 1994 and 2012) when a reasonably computer-literate user could sit down in front of almost any operating system and quickly get to grips with the GUI, no matter what their home base was. Windows, MacOS, CDE, OpenStep, OS/2 and even outliers like Amiga, Atari and BeOS all had more in common than what set them apart.

Personally, having used many of these systems during those years, I completely disagree.

There is no further context or evidence to support this claim. It’s just “the premise”.

This is then contrasted with vague generalizations about the current situation:

> Today, it seems we're on another track completely. Despite being endlessly fawned over by an army of professionals, Usability, or as it used to be called, "User Friendliness", is steadily declining. During the last ten years or so, adhering to basic standard concepts seems to have fallen out of fashion

While there is no evidence for the claim that usability was better in the 90s, there are some examples to show that it’s worse now.

But these are more like pet-peeves, and there’s no evidence or theory to show why they’re good or bad, just more vague generalizations.

> Since Windows 2 (not 2000 - I'm really talking about Windows 2), users have been able to resize windows by dragging their top border and corners. Not so with Slack, anymore.

This is not the decline of usability. It’s the decline in respect for the reader.

There really was a time when a title faithfully represented the text that followed it, right? It must have been sometime around 1994.