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The anti-minimalist backlash is the bigger story behind Oxygen’s revival
(filipfila.wordpress.com)
this post was submitted on 12 May 2026
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One good thing about minimalist GUIs is they're much easier to optimize. Of course, you can still fuck it up, especially if your name is Microslop. Amazing how relatively demanging monochromatic rectangles with no animations can be.
You don't have to optimize rounded corners, blur or fancy animations if you don't code them in at all. Not necessarily the best approach, but at least there's a positive. Everything can be messed up easily, but not everything can be done right easily.
you would think so, but somehow that never seems to be the case in practice. software has just been getting way more simplified visually while also getting way heavier with the likes of electron, GTK4, QML, etc.
for example, gnome-calculator uses nearly 300 MB of RAM on my system. that's significantly more memory than my entire desktop environment (trinity). in the '00s everything was plastered with glossy skeuomorphic textures, 3D animations, transparency with blur, etc. and running all these different glossy programs together on one system still left you with a smaller memory footprint than gnome's calculator.
we are fucked and our UIs don't even get to be pretty anymore.