The specific complaint was "the insane UI," if I read the comment correctly. Time Machine's UI is possibly the last holdover from Apple's peak sizzle-and-flash design days, the era of brushed metal and skeuomorph-all-the-things even when there isn't exactly a real-world analogue to emulate.

To be fair, it's less insane in Monterey than it used to be. No wooshy space background, faster to launch, easier to scroll. But do we really need the "stacked window" view, for instance? Was that chosen originally because it's clearer than choosing a backup date from a dropdown menu, or was it chosen originally because we wanna look like we're using a sci-fi machine to GO BACK IN TIME woooo? I mean, we know the answer here, right?

Ah that's fair. The "Space Rolodex" theme is a bit motion-sickness inducing.

I find that useful because I can navigate to a folder where it used to live, and then flip back until the file I was looking for appears.

Compared to the alternatives: Connected Backup and Carbonite require me to manually enter dates until I find the file, and for a while Carbonite would keep closing the folder tree requiring me to re-expand every branch each time the date changed. However, duplicity requires me to dump the entire log and grep, which is a power user solution one could argue.

I think duplicity wins here because I can grep for the filename. But barfing Mac Rolodex can be helpful if I don't know the filename.

If you rotate your wallpaper every week or so it actually ends up being a pretty cool visual indicator that's probably more memorable for some people than a drop-down menu would be.

Ideally we'd have both obviously. The big issue with it for me is that it has a timeline on the right with each backup by date so you don't have to do the stacked windows, but there's no labels to indicate the span of dates. It only has a label on dates when you had backups but there are no labels to orient yourself in time when you start rolling back.