Let me get this out of the way right in the beginning: I like the Linux desktop. I care about the Linux desktop. I like the projects I am discussing here, and I appreciate the hard work people are putting in. But I’d like to see the Linux desktop improve. And I think a wakeup call is needed, because things are not always being changed for the better.

With this out of the way, let’s dive right in… Linux desktop usability, the good, the strange, and the outright ugly. OK, I will mostly skip the good in the interest of brevity.

Menus

There is a tendency of desktop environments and applications to mess around with the proven concept of menus.

Bill Atkinson, the inventor of menus as we know them, describes:

I’m proud of the pull-down menus. I thought that the pull-down menu was a very good solution to providing visibility, spatial memory of where the commands were.

Source: Computer History Museum, Oral History of Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Atkinson

Why is there this unsettling tendency to kill the beloved “File, Edit,…” menus that also date back to the Lisa user interface design and have been engraved into our brain muscles for the last 40 years?

File, Edit,… menus circa 1980 in the Lisa’s user interface. Source: Wikimedia

As Bill Atkinson describes:

And the other nice thing about it was that because the titles of the menus were always much narrower than the items, it basically tripled your effective screen. You could scan along the top and see all available commands without doing any of them. You could harmlessly see what is available.

With menus, you can click on a menu, hold the mouse button down, and move the mouse horizontally to see all available commands of an application immediately.

Says Xerox PARC and Apple veteran Larry Tesler, interviewed in 2003, talking about Bill Atkinson in 1982:

Bill went home; in one night he developed the entire pull-down menu system! Everything! He hadn’t just moved it to the top of the screen; he had the idea that as you scanned your mouse across the top, each menu would pop down, and they would ruffle as you went back and forth, and appear so that you could scan them all. . . . He’d thought up the whole thing in one night! I can’t imagine what happened that night.

Source: designinginteractions.com

See this interview with Bill Atkinson:

Ever since Microsoft introduced the Ribbon, no one ever finds any commands anymore. At least I don’t.

Ribbon instead of menus. Source: Wikimedia

But it’s not only different, it’s also a big step backward compared to what Apple figured out around 40 years ago. With the Ribbon? You have to click through every single tab to see all the commands.

Similarly, and possibly even worse, there is an unfortunate tendency in web browsers to move away from the menu into some obscure “hamburger menu” positioned at a weird position on the screen.

Google Chrome web browser using an unrecognizable icon instead of a menu bar. Source: Twitter

Here is the Firefox version of it:

Firefox web browser a similar concept instead of a menu bar

Now, with a menu bar you could reach the “About” dialog box with one single click, and dragging the mouse around. With this thing, you need at least three clicks, and you need to know where you have to click. A giant step backward with no apparent advantages. Proven desktop UX concepts seem to be dumbed down in an effort to turn the efficient, productive desktop experience into a cumbersome smartphone-like one.

(After the publication of this article, a reader told me to right-click the Firefox hamburger button and select “Menu Bar” to get the menu back. So much for Discoverability!)

This post summarizes it well:

And this nonsense is not limited to web browsers, either, GNOME 3 is clearly worst of class:

GNOME 3 in Ubuntu 17.04 hiding what used to be the menu in a “hamburger menu”

But it’s not just GNOME alone. There seems to be a crusade underway to cripple menus. The design minded elementary OS is even worse. The “Settings” icon is all that is apparently left from the menus. Where is copy, where is paste?

Text editor in elementary OS 0.3

After the initial publication of this article, I was shocked to find out that the Xerox Star had the hamburger menu in 1981 (before the Lisa and the Macintosh) — look closely: