2.2 KiB
Bad things
Web browsers
https://drewdevault.com/2020/08/13/Web-browsers-need-to-stop.html
https://macwright.com/2020/08/22/clean-starts-for-the-web.html
(but fuck Markdown)
Scrap it all, start anew. Content goes first, presentation second. Don’t allow for the inverse to happen. I’m not interested in anyone’s animations and gray font.
GNOME 3
Removing features, worsening accessibility, making the UI incomprehensible, piling up laughable levels of complexity, politically driven development, everything is wrong here.
KDE
KDE will always be hideously ugly, it’s the one constant in the universe. See a case study.
Pop-ups
Anything that shows up and changes the consequences of the user’s actions, if it doesn’t appear as an immediate result of the user doing something, is pure evil. Sadly, this is sometimes hard to avoid, or the cost is too high.
Major culprits that make me want to hurt the computer: Firefox, Thunderbird (e.g. certificate problems when your network MITMs you and you haven’t run sshuttle yet), Qt Creator (files changed externally).
Unix terminals
Barely tolerable with graphical displays. The character grid must go, not only because variable pitch fonts are infinitely more pleasant to read. See also: So you want to make a TUI…
The only redeeming quality is how well these work over slow links.
ASCII
Outdated, made for teletypes. Unicode mostly just adds more complexity (and characters). For sanity reasons, I’ll put up with it and try to avoid the parts I don’t like, perhaps even banning certain characters where possible.
Centralisation
Try to build things so that they survive outages—resilient, robust, and even antifragile. Admittedly, this principle is hard for humans to follow.
Speaking of which, project Haven has no public mirrors yet. Not that it matters thus far… but eventually we should at least set up mirrorring to repo.or.cz, which is local.