UI Degradation in Prusa Slicer 2.8.0

hoffmantactical

Prusa made some changes to the UI in the Alpha of V2.8: https://github.com/prusa3d/PrusaSlicer/releases/tag/version_2.8.0-alpha5

Most of these changes were good, but one of them has been a pain since I upgraded.

The system menus were removed and replaced with a single button that adds more clicks to get to a desired menu option. What are everyone's thoughts on this? I see it as part of the ridiculous trend to make desktop software UI's more like mobile UI's. Not an improvement. It may be Prusa trying to "keep up" with Bambu as well. However, I don't know much about software dev trends and thought some of you might have a better idea.

j2a

I'm a software engineer who does a lot of UI work and I don't like it either. I guess it's "cleaner"? Screen real estate isn't much of an issue these days so I wonder if people really complain about the menu taking up space. An option to disable this would've been good. I don't care that much about the extra click, but then again I didn't care that the standard menu took up some real estate either.

hoffmantactical

j2a For most people I don't think it's a big problem, but I do a lot of exports when processing models and it gets old fast. Might be able to set up a shortcut. Screen space is definitely not an issue, and I only run 1920 x 1080.

I suspect that Prusa is trying to "keep up" with Bambu and that is why they did it. A very bad reason to do anything.

Yukon V2.8 does have some cool new features, nothing I've really used yet, but some of them could be nice (such as only one top layer perimeter).

The cloud based slicing is alarming, especially from Prusa. Simply no reason to do so.

Yukon

I'm still on 2.7. That does look very inconvenient, I am not looking forward to updating...

Just a guess, with more Prusa Connect integrations, maybe they're making the framework for the web UI if they do offer a cloud-based Prusa Slicer option as Josef teased on Twitter, sort of iterating on your point about them trying to "keep up" with the ecosystems competition has created.

The only appeal I would see is making the software feel less intimidating for beginners perhaps? If that's the case, it would have been nice if they built on the "Simple", "Advanced", and "Expert" tier system, and had the menu hidden for the "Simple" mode but fully visible for the "Expert" mode.