Compare an ordinary pencil (no animations, movement is directly tied to your hand) to a pencil with a pompom on a spring attached to the end. Which is most fun for brief use? Which would you rather write a whole page of text with?
One of the ways to achieve this is to not actually transition between states, but simply animate the "end bounce" of an introduced element, as if it was eased into position. So not actually slid from the left, for example, but rebounding the last few pixels from an imaginary slide. Our eyes just draw their conclusions to inform us of a movement, and in exchange the component is readable and usable immediately.
[1] ~100ms represents optimal reflex time in recent research. [2] Anything that requires user attention to interact after the component appears is very comfortable with a 150ms transition. One important note is that for components you can navigate across (i.e. one key shortcut invokes a modal state, another key runs a command in that modal), experienced users will "type" consecutive shortcuts in one go, and you must have the second behaviour responsive from frame 1.
[2] Some athletes seem to train down to ~80ms on very specific reflexes, which recently lead to race-start controversies when block timers disqualify sub-100ms reactions for runners.
Consider a toolbar with a mix of enabled and disabled buttons. Hover effects (which I would consider animations) convey that something is clickable, and on-click effects confirm an action. These effects convey meaningful information to both beginner users and power users of any software, and are in no way inconvenient to either group.
I generally agree animations tend to get in the way when you want to get shit done, but the idea that animations are only applicable as artistic effects rings untrue to me.
Instant transitions are something I strongly prefer and use in practice. There's no question, I don't want my operating system slowing itself down to a factor (literally) of 1000x, pointlessly fading and jiggling and sliding and bouncing and wiggling. And, as this article points out, animations in operating systems often make a visually illegible mess in the meanwhile.
Animations might be a good idea in theory, but it doesn't seem like anyone has figured out how to do them right.
Squash and stretch is a whole art style that relies on unrealistic frames.
Other applications are to do things. They should do the thing and get out of the way as fast as possible. Animation-induced delays are fundamentally contradictory with that; they waste the user's time instead of doing the thing.
Good and useful animations communicate something, they're not there just to be there or to make it "pretty", which is most designers use them. But they can actually communicate intent, action, immediacy and other important things, if they're used sparingly in the right situations, without actually getting in the way.
Probably the most basic animation most of us PC users see every day is the very basic animation of a text cursor blinking on/off in text fields, like the one I write it right now. It's super basic, but communicates that the computer is waiting for you, it's alive and you can enter things. If it was static, you get the impression something is stuck instead, or couldn't tell exactly where the cursor is at a glance. But it blinks, and that tells us stuff.
Reasons:
1) I'm doing that thousands of times per week, I know what's going to happen
2) It's my desktop, there is no one else who might be puzzled by a non standard behavior
3) It's faster.
By the way, it is a GNOME desktop on Debian 13.
Oops, I lied. I was about to click on Reply and I realized that the bottom panel (which on a standard GNOME is at the top) is on autohide with a short transition. Maybe because it's the only transition that I activate with the mouse pointer: I hit the bottom of the screen and while it's traveling the last pixels the bar starts sliding in. It's very fast.