Is darkmode a fad? ⬛

Nthcdr doesn't like dark mode

I agree, and I'm puzzled why it's so popular. The first GUI I used was Win 3.0 at the beginning of the 90s, and colour scheme options included light-on-dark. No one used that because it was awful. The option was available in every subsequent GUI, and everyone carried on ignoring it.

Maybe about ten years ago it began to appear occasionally among devs. It seemed to me like a geek badge, not a real usability thing, and I ignored it. Now it's the norm for devs, and continues to be ignored by everyone else.

What happened? I remember putting an unstyled button on a web page and being told it "looked awful". No it didn't. It looked like a button. Whatever a button looks like on your platform, that's what you'll get. But UI people want control, a "look", not the default.

Desktop apps started to ignore the OS defaults for windows, widgets, and colour scheme. They started offering the user colours just for that one app. Most people don't customise software, but geeks do. Now their tools can look extra geeky.

You have the chance to resist this; not to be a sheep. There are so many options besides light and dark. You could have the CDE look!

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/ae/CDE_Application_Builder.png/960px-CDE_Application_Builder.png

/rant

#darkmode

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