In part it's because I don't like check boxes. They don't have great feedback about what's going to happen. If I designed a UI where someone is likely to check a lot of boxes, I would feel I had done something very wrong.

Sometimes it's unavoidable and so the framework might as well allow it. And as a user, designers often do things I wouldn't have. But I can say I don't miss having that feature.

https://lobste.rs/s/v6mkz6/implementing_one_more_ui_componen...

The one that drives me crazy is slider based checkboxes. I never know which side is on/off. Bad UI convention.

And speaking of checkboxes, I want an actual tick mark (checkmark), not a X cross. Its called checkbox, not Xbox or crossbox, it has to be a checkmark. Also, its a square, not a box. Disaster.

And yes, radio buttons got their name from the push-button ganged switches that were ubiquitous on pre-digital radios.

But also, when you have a dozen monochromatic pixels to work with, 'square' and 'round' are pretty much the only usefully distinct shapes. Checkboxes were square for obvious reasons, so to distinguish a similar set of controls, you pretty much have to use a circle.

I'm pretty sure these concepts moved directly from physical systems to digital ones. Every person alive then knew what an empty square next to a line of text meant, and everyone understood the concept of ganged push-buttons. Just map it onto a pixel grid and you're good to go

It's just one opinion versus another, but in my experience early radios often had round buttons. I'm thinking of the kind of radios that preceded TVs.

Cassette decks certainly had rectangular "one choice only" buttons, but those came along decades later.