I don't know who in the linux community one day decided capsules, rounded edges, and neon colors was a "good look" but I just find it so tacky and amateurish and I'm probably alone in that thinking.

Also Jetbrains mono as the defacto go to font.

I hate it. I just want vanilla sway; and i want everything else to look like it too.

I absolutely love my bland rectangles with text. Never changed my Waybar theme and I have no rounding on my windows. It's my 15 corner pixels of screen real estate, go away with your fanciness.

I seem to be solidly in a grumpy old man mood tonight.

You know what was good UI design language? Mid-late 90s Windows/MacOS/BeOS. Buttons looked like buttons and you could see if they were pressed or disabled. Same with sliders, radio button, and every other UI widget. The slight 3D look meant that it was obvious at a glance what was going on. Window corners has little grabbers to show where to grab. Scroll bars showed how much you could scroll, with obvious buttons to do so.

Everything about flat UI design is bullshit.

That's the same design language windows macos ios and android use so idk where you get amateurish

That still doesn’t mean that it’s not a shitty design language that looks like somebody just discovered the circle tool in gimp.

Because they are good look.

...yeah... About that circle tool...

My 4x4 grid of 16 workspaces over two activities in KDE

Idk, i do like some rounded corners in my bar and its widgets. The sharp square corners makes it feel like something is missing. Maybe adding a border or outline would fix that, but i don't like using those. I never tried Jetbrains as a font though. I decided to try Mononoki years ago and have never switched to any other mono font since then. After all this time it's still pleasing to my eyes.

Hahahahah. Yeah, indeed....

A lot of people prefer rounded to sharp corners, if given the option. And given that sharp corners are the most bland default for a UI, I'm not even sure how one can call rounded corners amateurish while defending sharp ones: if you put no effort in an interface whatsoever, you end up with sharp corners.

Am I the only person that doesn't understand what I am looking at here? (other than I get that something is displaying or working on the second of eight things - is this some specific UI element I should know?)

it is the workspace indicator of gnome

There are 8 workspaces open (lots of windows) and the second one is currently on display

And that's pretty much still what my waybar looks like. I really don't mind it at all, it's small and minimalistic.

I think your viewpoint is heavily influenced by nostalgia

For the same reason people don't want to live in concrete boxes

I hate workspace indicators without an index, I have the following for Sway/Niri/Hyprland.

• Green bar: Current focused monitor
• Cyan Bar: Visible workspace on other monitor
• Gray numbers: Empty workspaces
• White numbers: Workspaces with winodws

(I also have 1-5 in left monitor and 6-10 to the right)

• workspace 1 is for rhythmbox & sometimes geary
• workspace 2 is like the main, for browser
• worksoace 3 is for main work software
• workspace 4 is for secondary work software or references/files

workspace 8 is for porn personal note taking.

AH, gotcha, thanks! I've tended to stick closely to KDE out of familiarity so don't know Gnome that well.

Great idea, let's all go live in plastic spheres instead!

Is this a phone? Like a Linux phone?

Pretty sure, it's a Gnome Shell extension for active workspaces.

I agree with this. Might also be nostalgia or might be that the younger generations have not experienced an intuitive ui. I always try to keep an open mind about updates to software, but the flat design stuff has gone too far, a text box is just a line on a solid color background sometimes, how the fuck should anyone know it expects text input unless they have used it before? I'm an experienced software dev I have worked with all kinds of user interfaces on PC's and on industrial equipment, and I find flat design confusing, a bloody cnc controller from the 80's is easier to navigate is some aspects. Rant over. This is just my opinion, consider me an old man jelling at cloud infrastructure or whatever the trending term is.

But do you aim to close them as a stack or a queue