Admittedly it’s been while since I last wrote about this (formerly MATE-based) desktop environment, but it’s still out there, shipping as default experience in Ubuntu Kylin, doing its thing.
[…]But not for much longer, it seems.
Based on an updated shared on Chinese social media, the UKUI team appear to be rebuilding UKUI using Qt. The plan, they say, is to stick to to the same “easy, excellent, expert, elaborate” mantra that the original UKUI desktop was (supposedly) built to.
I’m highlighting this here because there’s a ton of interesting Linux desktop work going on in China that we in the west rarely talk about, such as Deepin and its Qt-based Deepin Desktop Environment that’s also available on some other distributions. UKUI fits in that same bucket.
There’s, of course, legitimate concerns over code from China, but since these projects are open source, it would seem there’s little to worry about on that front. The fact of the matter is that, totalitarian dictatorship or not, Chinese people are just regular folks, and many of them are probably excellent programmers and designers that can contribute a lot to the health, variety, and competition within the desktop Linux and wider open source community.
Heh, one is a Win10 clone, the other a Mac clone. Or perhaps they were only “inspired” by those. 😀
That was my thought too 🙂
It has been quite a while since i have really used Linux as a desktop, so i might remember it with rose tintet glasses, but i do not really see anything in those screenshots and the video where i thought it looked better than the established environments.
Man, I hate those LSD-inspired desktops. IMO Vista was the pinnacle of beatiful UI design.
kurkosdr,
There’s a typo there, you typed vista when I’m sure you meant windows 2k 🙂
I thought windows vista was very close in style to some of the windows 95 plus themes, for those who remember. At the time it was neat because it was different, but after the novelty wore off I’ve stuck with more conventional themes. I realize some people place more importantance on artsy attributes, which is fine it that’s what they want, but I find themes can go too far at the cost of clarity: borders and controls that are easy to discern, easy to read fonts, good contrast, etc. It may be boring, but old-school designers were about enhancing context & clarity. Quite a start contrast to windows 8, haha.
I think I meant to type Vista thank you very much. Putting words in people’s mouths isn’t a nice thing you know. The added depth was neat, as it gave extra concept and the vector icons with their gradients were superb
kurkosdr,
It was a joke 🙂
Windows 2K was almost identical to Windows 95. IIRC, the only difference is Win2K had a gradient on the top window bar, and maybe some slight tweaking in the default colour scheme. Maybe some of the icons were different too.
Functionally though, it was identical.
The123king,
Functionally windows 2k came from the windows nt line, whereas windows 95 through windows ME were still on the DOS evolutionary track. There were quite a few differences under the hood, and functionally these weren’t completely compatible due to different drivers & control panels, etc. But since you’re talking about appearances, then yeah it wasn’t all that different. In windows history, most desktop changes have been merely incremental, with notable exceptions, but rarely.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Me
Alfman, we were talking about UI, not internals. I’m fully aware of the under-the-hood differences beween 9x and NT based Windows.
for the end user, however, the interfaces of 95 and 2K were almost identical.
No, clearly they meant to type OS9 on PS/2…I mean, Great Wall OS on Great Wall PC 4.
And the Weirding thing is lack of discoverability on iOS.
Why don’t I see any USI styli on BangGood yet?
“kurkosdr
Man, I hate those LSD-inspired desktops. IMO Vista was the pinnacle of beatiful UI design.”
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Nah,not LSD. Looks like they’ve gotten hold of some really old/bad Peyote.
Nah. LSD-inspired desktop you will probably get Gnome.
Hamburger Menus, high resource consumption, a frigging clock at the center of your bar, a bar that cant be used to see programs names, and all those decisions made by people that are using this kind of drug.
“But hey, you could use some extensions”, and most of them are written in Python with lack of optimizations.
They always make poor decisions.
It’s based on Mate (Gnome 2) but rewritten in Qt. Interesting. DDE went a similar path, loosely based on Gnome 3 I believe but using Qt. And then there’s LXDE which became LXQt.
Wow, yet another desktop in QT or what have you that is bloated and doesn’t have nearly the features of desktops from 20 years ago, color me not impressed.
It looks nice and clean from the outside, but so does 1984 society and that’s where this came from, so it has no place on my computers.
Ahem!. Hopely this post will not be deleted.
“The fact of the matter is that, totalitarian dictatorship or not, Chinese people are just regular folks, and many of them are probably excellent programmers and designers that can contribute a lot to the health, variety, and competition within the desktop Linux and wider open source community.”
Someone told me, that China’s government was being run like a corporation. You can debate, argue or disagree with the Chinese government as long as you do it internally (not public). And China will hear you, as any corporate entity will do, will hear your disagreement and may implement what you are suggesting, if in case your suggestion will work. The only thing that will cause the Chinese government to unless its wrath against its own citizens is that when became like a western activist. That is, when you criticize China in public and your intent is to shame the government. An analogy is like this, when you are working on a corporate environment, and you have a legitimate grievance against the management, but instead of going to human resource department or directly to your boss, you go directly of bashing the company in public. So what will the management do to you? Your answer is as good as mine.
Anyway, I urge western folks not to act like they knew everything in the east and the false belief that their opinion is always way ahead.
“Chinese people are just regular folks, and many of them are probably excellent programmers and designers that can contribute a lot to the health, variety, and competition within the desktop Linux and wider open source community.”
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Oh,oh…When GUI design wanks start going on about something like this, you know you’re looking at something that’s going to be utter garbage in the real world…..