I just accidentally clicked the “clear all” on the browser URL and wished that it was a bit harder to click but was still there. If it took three clicks to make happen, its still useful in most circumstances but would drastically drop the mistaken clicks
Anyway, what are your unpopular UI opinions?
Unpopular opinion: people like UIs.
OK, that one is only unpopular on specific, Linux-heavy parts of the internet. (Like… right here.) And even then, there aren’t that many people who disagree with me. But there are definitely a few people who have this idea that we’d all be using super fast, powerful command line applications for all of our tasks, were it not for big tech pushing the graphical interface on us.
I get it; I’m a command-line person myself. And big tech has pushed a lot of anti-user changes. But the truth is that most users want to use a mouse, they want to have a GUI, and the shift from keyboard to mouse wasn’t simply because Microsoft wanted to limit the users’ capability.
I don’t think that’s an unpopular opinion. I’ve basically lived in the command line for more than two decades, and even I prefer UIs for certain tasks:
If I’m cropping a single image, I’m firing up Gimp, Preview, Paint or whatever tool is already installed. If I’m cropping 30 images in the same way, I rediscover how imagemagick works and script it.
It’s all about what’s faster and easier to get the job done, and whether a UI or the command line is preferable depends on how often I do the task (which determines if I remember how the CLI works) and how repetitive the task is (which determines if I want to script it).
What really grinds my gears, though, is how many people prefer a pretty UI over a functioning UI.