Stefan Schick's personal Blog

A lot of popular software is loud. It shows me notifications, popups, and all the new features I don’t care about. I want to make the case, that quiet software is better. Quiet software is there for me if I need it, it does its job but otherwise gets out of my way as much as possible. Let me elaborate: I grew up with an Atari ST, then got my first PC with Windows 95, and soon after switched to Linux. Back then on the Atari ST, it was reasonable to have only one program open. Even with Microsoft Windows 95, this held up because the hardware and the many crashes were the limiting factors. The programs were single purpose and cross communication between programs and the operating system was rare. To display additional information the status bar within the program was used or a message box was created by the program.