Someone here mentioned the existence of the "reduce animations" setting on Android and I decided to try it.
After having used it for a week or two my conclusion is that oh wow, I had no idea just how exhausting all these fancy animations actually are. Not having everything zoom, swoosh and fly around and just place themselves in their expected locations feels so much less stressful.
I wonder if there are any papers written on the mental effects of excessive animations.
And I do agree that those animations are neat, and as an old demo programmer, I love their design, but they really are giving me a kind of mental fatigue.
@loke It'd be great if there was a setting for enabling only cool, rare animations. But I got fed up with constant swooshing some years ago, and disabled them on Android, and stopped using Cinnamon
Like @johncarlosbaez I've never noticed any animations. But once I turned it off it feels like my phone got twice as fast. Things happen instantly, not after a delay.
@jannem@johncarlosbaez yes, I think that's one of the reasons it feels more comfortable. You don't have these short delays all the time. The phones are fast enough that the animations are not needed to hide slow computation so everything is just faster.
@loke - I never see fancy animations on my Android phone, but I don't remember turning them off. No, I don't have them off. But I never see them. What would be a typical task that would create an animation?
@johncarlosbaez The change one notices right away is that the loading spinner isn't spinning anymore. Instead it's a static instance of a circular arrow.
Another difference is that when you dismiss notifications, they don't scroll out of view but instead simply disappear.
Yet another one is when you switch between applications. With animations enabled the old one zooms out and disappear, while the now one moves in and zooms to the normal size. With animations off, they just appear.
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