alt Hacker NewsIdeas on modernizing the open-source desktop
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We could do well with change on the desktop, but very little of the change I've seen during the past 10+ years is actually benefiting the user. Even on Linux, the changes happening are stuff like bugfixes and reducing jank; small incremental improvements that have already been done, but are just getting their final round of polish.
All the other changes I see are just shuffling around the UI, which doesn't really help anyone. And even newer features are either so marginal as to not matter, or can't be trusted to stick around. Why bother to learn a new UI, when all that does is get you back to square 1, and it might not even stick around? I'd be much more interested in tweaking my DE if I could be confident in knowing that those tweaks will persist and not cause other problems down the line, but I have no such assurance.
I don't blame the casuals for hating UI updates. I myself went to Linux to get a more cohesive and stable experience. If we're going to make changes, we need to not break workflows that already exist. New features and workflows need to either not be in the way for established users, or opt-in until they're established and known good. Doing anything else is user hostile, and by this time, given how much we know users don't like changing UI, dare I say, evil.
What I'm missing from DEs is a "home folder" per virtual desktop. I want to switch to an empty desktop, `cd` into my project folder, and have all commands scoped to that folder.
For example: - New terminal: CWD is set to folder - File search: scoped to this folder - Run commands from launcher: dir contents are suggested as arguments - Command history: scoped to this folder
I wrote dinu[1] a decade ago but integrating with Wayland compositors is a pain (no widely supported "what workspaces are there"), so I gave up a little.
https://www.eclipse.org/articles/Article-UI-Guidelines/Conte...
In 2004, the Eclipse IDE established consistent UI guidelines, built upon a cross-platform GUI library. API desgin is great, Looks and feels robust. The future of desktop GUIs looked bright. Little did we know that 25 years later it would turn out to be such a disaster.
For me it was a major revelation when it was pointed out that, for someone who doesn't want his desktop changed, I did install all sorts of crazy things when I was starting with Linux (Compiz plugins, anyone?). And while Gnome 3 pushed me into Mate, it wasn't because it was different but rather because it was bad. So I'm excited about someone trying something new, particularly someone who realizes that the Desktop is not a tablet.
Here's an idea that I believe I read in HN as "the original purpose of the desktop": add a Desktop Manager that manages which icons are on your desktop and makes it easy to switch.
The desktop is kind of weird, in the sense that it's prime real estate but, at the same time, there's an expectation that you shouldn't put too much stuff there, and then it ends up cluttered anyway. I think it's worth trying a stronger separation between "Desktop" and any other regular folder, emphasizing that the Desktop is where you place links to the files you need right now, but with a mechanism to clear it completely (without losing data) and another to switch which icons you see right now, kind of like browser tab groups. That way, when you're working on a project you place the files you need on the desktop and when you're done you clean it up.
Man, there have been so many cool ideas for the Linux desktop in the past, and somehow none of them worked out or were polished into a usable state. Some things I remember: * I think at one point Canonical tried to have a cool personal data sync with Ubuntu One using CouchDB which would have synced all your data between devices directly, not using a cloud? * KDE 4 tired to have everything be a plasmoid (widget)? You could drag contacts to your desktop? But now we mostly have panels and tray popups again * Similar, things like Evolution data server or Akonadi or Telepathy which promised to implement the "backend" for services like email, calendar and chat once and then you could integrate custom UIs into many apps and places in the desktop with a synchronized view (chat with a contact in your email programm? write a calendar appointment from you chat app that your friend sent you?) * Maemo on the N900 had one contact list which served both SMS, Skype and XMPP and starting a chat using any one of those would get you to the same app/interface, same for the call, all happening in a single interface.
That is really the direction of "UX" I'm interested in. Not so much about where to display what, but to make my computing device feel less like an accumulation of applications and data, but to have a more integrated experience, ideally even across devices. My laptop and phone barely talk to each other and the user account on each device is distinct, so sharing resources already fails on authentication not being solved.
I think open source is in a unique position to actually provide a much better UX than any proprietary computing environment, since it's not tied to a single company trying to sell you stuff. Gnome and KDE don't care where you store your emails or calendar, they don't want to upsell you into their cloud storage. Open source is free to integrate the best services in a way that has the best UX and it can even do things like sync directly between your devices, because it doesn't need to generate new business opportunities.
The Linux desktop does need work, but it's not 100% up to speed yet, either. The ultimate UX can be found when the user has 100% control over the experience and we aren't there yet. Wayland won't allow window size/position to be remembered between sessions and too many UX designers think the desktop is just a big phone. Yes, we need work on UX and the first step should be to get Wayland to allow the user the same flexibility we enjoyed with X11. Using Linux with multiple screens means reverting to X11 just to keep from going nuts.
I use Niri and love it. I think manually managing windows is a waste of time, and when I watch normal users they usually struggle with this and their desktop is a disaster zone. I never want to go back to that. Tiling window managers are slightly better, but they still require you do window management.
It's been a week that Valve has started shipped KDE in a VR headset running Linux.
Meanwhile it's been years since KDE Connect allows devices to talk to each, sending SMS on desktop from phone, pausing phone podcast from desktop, sharing files from XR headset to desktop, etc.
A lot could be improved but the modern open-source desktop is already doing great.
Listen, as long as control-alt-T opens a CLI window that I can fullscreen you can do whatever you want with that self-Gratification User Interface crap.
The only change to the CLI since I first learned it over 40 years ago is that it's gotten bigger and clearer and most desktops allow me to have multiple CLIs I can switch between.
A graphical user experience is all about how to limit what I can do in an effort to make it easier to learn. Imagine a hammer designed for ease of use by a beginning carpenter: remove the dangerous claw and nasty thumb-crushing head and replace the handle in case you hold it wrong and you end up with a nice oven mitt. The chattering classes on social media can coo over its colours and textures. Meanwhile actual carpenters smirk, hitch up their trousers (or, often, not) and switch on their nail gun.
So go ahead and build your bike shed with a box a nails and a pair of taupe quilted cotton hammers with a pattern of garden vegetables stamped on the back.
> The final, particularly strong, objection from the tech community is "don't touch my stuff". People get angry when they have worked hard to get their desktop environment just as they like it and something changes to disrupt that.
Yeah, this can be a little extreme, and I feel we can benefit from being a little more open to trying new things.
The part about designing specifically for large displays and widescreen monitors was interesting. We can also reverse it, though: right now I'm away from home, and I only have this old laptop which is mostly great but has a shitty touchpad as the mouse, and I have to think this must be really common. However, this situation seems to be completely ignored by all desktop UX design. We seem to be pretty good at coming up with ways to use the mouse in our programs, but when the mouse is hard to control and unreliable, it causes pain. I guess I can use ratpoison or something, but that seems to be giving up too much.
Regarding the AI going deep into the filesystem and organizing my data...I'm extremely skeptical of inserting any kind of inherent unpredictability into how I interact with the computer. Giving a command or input should produce a well-defined and predictable (in principle) action. Getting rid of that paradigm fundamentally changes the relationship between the user and the computer in a way that, in my opinion at least, greatly diminishes its usefulness as a tool.
I actually think there's some awesome UX innovation in the world of Linux. In fact, one of the things I love and appreciate about Linux, is that there's such a variety of what the desktop could be. I personally use Elementary OS, which is very polished and reliable, but very much not trying to innovate how a desktop environment fundamentally works.
But for those who want to experiment, I've seen: - Tiling window managers (I3, Awesome, etc) - Highly customizable panels and launchers (Rofi, Lemonbar, etc) - Scrolling window managers (Nori, and others I think)
Honestly, the linux desktop has a lot of criticisms you could level at it, but lack of innovation isn't one. Where Windows and Mac have agreed on a standard that hasn't changed much in the last 10 years, Linux has about a zillion different visions for what a desktop can be.
The article also links to the video recording of the actual talk. I usually prefer text, but video might be a better medium for conveying these ideas: https://media.ccc.de/v/kde2026-7-are_we_really_going_to_use_...
(link timestamped to 29min, where the demo starts.)
I feel we've been there before, I clearly remember the compiz/beryl years: they were not just about bling being added to traditional window manager and desktop environments, new window management paradigms were being experimented with (using 3d walls to stick windows and icons on, circular action menus, etc). Whatever stands to supersede the ubiquitous WIMP paradigm has to come up with substantial gains.
Simply implementing the NeXTStep v3.3 look and feel would immediately solve most problems, I think.
I used an actual NeXT workstation for 8 months as my only desktop in the mid 1990s and it was the most integrated and best GUI I’ve ever used.
I would replace the start menu with a Raycast clone. Most people want to open files, ask a question or run an app they know the name of, not scroll a list of things they might never use. If you add in semantic search users don't even need to know the app name.
It's also a perfect use for local System One models that can classify prompts and forward them to the right module - calculator for math, distrobox for shell commands, LLM for natural language questions and normal search for everything else. Not using a fixed classifier because plugins should be able to add their own question types.
The article mentioned WinFS and relational filesystems. That's another good idea, integrate metadata so you can support use cases like finding all pictures of your dog or all playlists with Ed Sheeran songs (to remove them). Everything bound to the file entries instead of ID3 tags inside the file or app specific databases. It would be a lot more reliable and probably faster.
IIRC bcachefs is already a relational database but I don't know how good the query APIs are. If we can't do full extendable tags then at least add user defined groups/tags like Work and Games and Photos to make finding things easier. People remember what a file is better than where it's stored.
I watched the video form of this and it was pretty informative, but I left it not really feeling anything was missing from the current desktop in terms of window management. It’s simple and old enough to be pretty well designed already.
What I do find is really lacking is UX inside of many foss apps. So many of them feel like windows xp programs with toolbars that look like junk drawers.
People have different ideas of what's good UX, because everybody comes from their own tradition of using desktops. Some people don't see anything wrong worth evolving from with mouse, point, click. The kind of thinking from the article, from someone that only worked on big companies, is the thinking from someone looking for the next big product, which I look with suspicion. At some point this stops being about good UX and starts being about a good product that makes good profit.
True revolution in UX will come from making customisation accessible, so everyone can decide what's best for them without losing their minds in endless customisation rabbit holes or having to rely on big and clumsy organizations.
There have only been two changes I experienced in the past decades that felt meaningful:
(1) Removing the mouse from as many workflows as possible
(2) Switching to a tiling window manager, in my case i3
Everything else has just been various ways of shuffling things around with no benefit to anyone.
I was kinda expecting more concrete examples of what could be done rather than just "go experiment" and "take lead", because if I don't have something that actually has a good idea, proper ergonomics and objective improvement, I'll just go back to tiling console windows with auto completed commands.
One thing I remember fondly from Windows 3.1 times was Dashboard by Starfish software. It was meant to replace Program Manager and was indeed a very good replacement. It offered multiple desktops, taskbar, program organization, but it was very customizable, so if you didn't want, say, taskbar, you could turn it off; same for all other parts. It could be made very compact and with a global shortcut to bring it to front it was truly handy. Very much like a car dashboard; you operated it from muscle memory.
I watched the full video and, as with the previous talk, absolutely loved it.
I hope Scott keeps spreading the good word and inspiring others to take different perspectives
Rarely commented upon: It was Windows, with its horrific mess of user settings and sub-settings panels dating back decades, which introduced the idea of just typing in what setting you were looking for and pulling up a list of relevant panels. That was...kind of smart? If you're not going to actually go through and optimize everything? And then MacOS copied it, VSCode copied it... it became the default way to find whatever you were looking for. Need to fix the way your trackpad is working? Here: Instead of spending an hour digging through the mouse and input and keyboard and trackpad and accessibility and all the drivers for everything you own, just type in "speed". Okay, better.
The problem is that this doesn't really fix the underlying issue, which is the bozo explosion of footguns in the UI itself. In fact, it just papers over all the problems.
A good UI needs to be opinionated. And also, getting rid of cruft is at least if not more important than building any new feature.
No, thanks, I require no modernization. I just need stable, but customizable UI, so that I can customize it once and use it my entire life without needing to adopt to new stuff constantly.
I was at Canonical during the Ubuntu Phone thing, and it was wild to watch that play out. It started out with a bunch of good ideas... but somehow, every last one of those good ideas got overturned and reversed.
Like, "let's put the buttons at the bottom so the user can reach it with their thumb while holding the phone" got turned into "let's put every important button at the top left where it's literally the hardest place on the whole screen for an average user to reach during typical use".
Or, more importantly, it started out as something like... "Debian/Ubuntu has a rich repository of high-quality full-featured battle-tested popular programs curated by community experts, designed by and for users to empower themselves, so lets give users a way to run all those beloved programs on mobile devices". And then it became "let's get rid of the package repository and forbid users from running anything from it, and build a brand new system which is incompatible with everything, and instead has a commercial app store where corps can sell proprietary software and Canonical gets a big cut of each sale, and the OS has only a small set of proof-of-concept placeholder programs, and is designed to restrict the user so corporate partners can have more profit and control".
And then when it didn't work out, the company kinda doubled down on some of the worst parts of it and went all-in on Snappy.
Instead of bringing phones up to the level of a desktop, as promised... the company tried to bring desktops down to the level of a phone. And that trend has been increasingly popular in the corporate Linux world lately... "Androidifying" desktop Linux.
sigh
I'm tired, boss.
I have recently installed Fedora Sway Spin and it's so nice. I did change the configs since I have been using i3/sway for a long time. But otherwise, the default setup is just very sensible.
I guess, the only thing it's missing is an AI agent component, but for now I don't know how to integrate one and trust it that it won't leak my personal data, so I prefer not to mess with that stuff.
> He talked about the desktop building blocks, basically the familiar WIMP model plus the desktop clipboard, as the way that users move data around. Expert users can move data around quickly, he said, but there's a problem: the desktop is stateless. He called this the curse of direct manipulation; there is no working memory to the desktop. ""If you copy a few too many things to the clipboard, oh sorry, it's gone"". > > Jenson theorized that the reason there are so many desktop environments, window managers, and Wayland compositors for Linux—as well as alternative clipboard managers—is because the desktop isn't quite working right for users. He thought it was really about working memory: ""How do I manage my data in such a way that I can remember it across all of these things and actually use it."" His perspective shifted to asking ""what would we do to working memory to improve the desktop UX?""
I feel this so much.
I think that there's a "better" windowing system where all of your stuff sticks around way more than it used to. Clipboard history, but also just "oh you have these windows open while working on this task".
People have really leaned into coding harnesses + chat windows as a way of grouping together work. I think there's a more general idea in this space. Don't make me explicitly keep track of things, just hold onto it all for me!
There's some universe where my desktop is basically a Notion-like thing, and I can just throw things into semi-persistent workspaces (that I close out when I'm done). Desktop Environments that make this work nicely will be quite cool IMO
(A simple and dumb version of this is the BeOS "group various windows together, even though they aren't from the same application" stuff. Very cool stuff IMO
> "what would happen if we only designed for large monitors?" What would it unlock if there were desktop designs that ignored laptops and only focused on widescreen monitors?
There's something to this thinking. Large workstation monitors are very much their own thing.
A real example l I've found: Niri (scrolling window manager) is really nice on a laptop but awful on my 6K display. The windows are way too tall, and the induced motion of large windows on a big screen is too much.
I love the future shaped by two things: Omarchy and Pop!_OS. Both give two different worlds, one serves classic Win/MacOS style users while another is new-age AI-native system.
Microsoft and Apple as leader dropped the ball. Microsoft's several dozen Windows-related teams dont care about UX (maybe UI). Apple is busy making money and mobile.
It really is currently the time and chance for Linux to finally innovate again.
* Alternatives to tree filesystem UNIX introduced (see WinFS, or how Android/iphone manage it)
* Alterantives to WIMP as discussed, specially for large monitors (37" - like 57")
* Every App should provide a REST API to access its functionality remotely (for AI and data exchange. Think OLE/COM in Windows, but good)
* PLAN9 anyone?
What I found interesting is desktop ui hasn’t changed much from either a windows layout or Mac layout. Isn’t there any other ui which is as useful as those two? Is there no ongoing research on os ui?
one thing I'll keep on beating the drum on is that microsoft missed an opening with windows 8. WinRT UI was great for mobile, but as noted desktop is different and they tried to force it onto it.
What we need (and to some extent we get in web, i.e. gmail is different based on resolution) is different UIs based on the interface one is using. a single app that can switch between UIs.
I strongly believe the lack of this is why convertibles have remained more of a gimmick than anything else, as in practice you either keep using the app the same way you always did as you switch usages or you use different apps in the the different usage scenarios because they are tailored to that specific usage scenario. Neither are things that really sell the convertible as something with strong usage.
The closest we've gotten is things like DeX on samsung and perhaps what google is rolling out with android.
When I first met Linux desktop in the nineties, I was blown away - and I was completely convinced that Linux would overtake Windows as the preferred desktop within a few years. Little did I know that what we would end up with was a thousand mediocre variants of it, instead of a few awesome ones.
My own Linux desktop experience peaked with Compiz, and I have been on macOS ever since.
Good talk.
Even if the desktop turns out to be done though, UX polish like that drag thing is still a good idea. Like why does no major desktop let you just put icons on your desktop the way classic Windows does?
Ironically, the LWN website's look and feel (and the reasoning behind it) perfectly illustrates why this project is doomed.
this was eye opening, i like the idea of the grouping together stuff on a clipboard
I want something like Os/2 Warp. Something with a design principle other than “make it look slick and hide stuff”. Look up CUA too.
I think Linux desktop should stay stable and not experiment much. If special users want special desktops, they can do it themselves. Look at where the constant updates and changes have brought Microsoft and Apple, was there an improvement? If you want something new, then make your distro.
Ha I reported that drag and drop bug 20 years ago. Windows does it in an even smarter way - it raises the window on mouse-down but only if the target isn't a drag source.
As I recall X11 doesn't really support that at all so there was no way to implement that on Linux. Doing it on mouse up seems sensible though. I couldn't find my bug report but I bet it was met with "I like it broken".
I've been using approximately the same desktop setup for ages, and yet, it often still feels like I'm living in the future because mainstream desktops still haven't really adopted some of the best features, and in some ways are moving backward. This is kind of a disorganized laundry list, but ...
For one, the ability to change how the desktop itself works while it's running, without restarting it... modifying the code on the fly. And if I manage to crash the window manager or some other desktop component, easily just restart it without having to log out or restart all the other programs.
And being able to pretty easily run and manage hundreds of windows. Log in, open one desktop for each project, and just leave it running until the project is done. Maybe reboot for upgrades once every year or two, but otherwise no disruptions.
NO DISRUPTIONS. I don't even have the underlying plumbing installed for notifications and stuff like that. They can try to interrupt me, but they'll find those API calls aren't plugged in to anything.
Freely mixing and matching tiled and floating windows, each of which can be its own tab group with multiple arbitrary windows sharing the same frame. Super handy having free-form placement and grouping of absolutely anything.
No minimized windows. No task bar. No icon tray. No desktop full of icons underneath the windows. The entire screen is one big canvas, to be used however you like. If you need more space, just hit a key to open another desktop.
Manage nearly everything with a keyboard. Mouse usable but not required.
Sloppy focus, of course. (i.e. focus follows mouse, but stays focused if mouse "falls out" of a window into empty space) Not click-to-focus. And definitely no raise-on-click or raise-on-focus.
Mouse keys built into the keyboard, for clicking, scrolling, and moving. Mouse warp too, to teleport the cursor, like having two mouse cursors and a key to swap between them.
A full set of launcher hotkeys which are easily configured and managed by making short shell scripts. Like, F1 to F12 run scripts from ~/bin named like "f1" to "f12", and "shift-f1" and "ctrl-f1" and "shift-alt-f1" and "hyper-shift-ctrl-f1", etc... if a script exists, the key is mapped. Ideally just symlink the named key to a program or script with a more descriptive name, like "shift-f3 -> open-todays-journal-in-vim.sh" or something like that. Easy to see exactly what each key does, with a "ls -l" or similar. (can send a normal f1-f12 event by holding Fn and hitting a number key or the two keys next to the numbers, but I barely ever have a reason to)
Network transparency for everything, of course. It's wild that newer desktops have chosen to remove such a useful feature.
Work at my desk with a notebook to either side, all using a single keyboard+mouse... just slide the cursor off one screen and onto the next. Pick up a notebook and move to the living room. Use its keyboard+mouse to control the notebook plus the television, in much the same way... slide the cursor off one screen and onto the next. Pack up and go to a coffee shop. Control the remote home computers from the local notebook, using their running desktop session. Or run programs natively on several remote computers, with the windows all opened together on one desktop on the notebook.
Automate inputs easily, whenever desired. Record and play macros which work in any program.
Configurations revision-controlled and synced across all my devices, privately, without any data leaking to a corporate cloud.
Organize data into a rich set of nested topic directories or project directories, instead of organizing things by file type into places like "~/Pictures", "~/Documents", etc.
But also, a directory for each day, to hold all the other misc stuff which doesn't fit elsewhere. And a key to easily access it.
Shell scripts can easily know what program I'm using in the GUI, and what directory the focused program is working in, so scripts can take context-sensitive actions.
Automatic private logging of what I do, with easy time tracking and arbitrary queries, using simple plain text log files which are small, easy to grep, and easy to build custom tooling around.
Human-readable plain text everywhere. Plain text files are versatile, powerful, portable, compact, timeless, accessible, and future-proofed.
No churn. No need to retool every few years. Long-lived tools which are mature and robust. Maybe not the flashiest or most fashionable tools, but "bells and whistles" and "useful life" are typically at odds with each other.
A rich vocabulary of small, simple tools which each do one thing well... makes for a powerful, expressive world of deep functionality thanks to the power of language. It empowers the user to do anything they can express. But a small set of huge tools, while initially a bit easier, tends to quickly become limiting and stifling.
I think a lot of the "right answers" for interface design have been figured out for a long time. That is not to say new interfaces are bad... but anything which throws out the old battle-tested solutions in favor of something radically different is going to take a long time to reach anywhere near the same level of usefulness.
Copy Microsoft backward-compatibility focus, Apples aesthetic choices, and media/game-engine API definitions.
Open desktops are like an architect that keeps moving the bathroom doors in a building under perpetual construction. The ecosystem naturally destroys itself every major release cycle, work put into quality of life improvements is lost, and code smell is so terrible people just abandon the projects after it becomes burdensome.
The mistake people make is trying to reason with people about which groups breaking changes take priority. This is why Cinnamon continues to run desktops on systems with broken GPU drivers, and installed as a fail-back GUI plan when Wayland glitches up.
People need to stop telling new users to follow a 15 step CLI tutorial to bring up a broken distribution Desktop. =3
non-paywalled link: https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1095425/c466ce1971e0e1df/
> He thought that it would be possible to do the things he was demonstrating with Wayland as it is today.
> People get angry when they have worked hard to get their desktop environment just as they like it and something changes to disrupt that. "And I get that. As I said before, I don't want to change everything." But the world is changing, "and we need to grow our way gently into some new things."
Sadly I think that I saw that too many time the useless and hated change just because things had to change. Like android theme instead if fixing bugs...
> Scott Jenson has been working on user interfaces (UIs) and user experience (UX) for many years at Apple, Google, and other companies.
Sorry but that's the last kind of person I want to have any say about my desktop. If I wanted dumbed down mass market design I'd use a mass market OS. Hopefully KDE resists what this guy suggests.
And of course he proves my concerns right at the end:
> The final idea he discussed was a way of gathering ""privacy-preserving data""
No, fuck off. You have not right to gather any data from my systems.
> when I joined, we weren't evil; we were really trying to do the right thing
Says everyone who worked for big tech ever.
.
Linux software isn't lacking in UX design, it has made different tradeoffs and that's OK and often even a strength:
> The developers wanted to put the ellipsis at the end of the file name, but he thought that would lose too much information, and suggested that the ellipses should be in the middle of the file names.
Both solutions hide the same amount of text and which hides more important text is coincidental. On the other hand hiding the end of the filename is more predictable for the user who can choose to put important information first for longer filenames.
> On most Linux systems, though, if a user is trying to click and drag a file from a window in the background it will cause the window to raise as soon as the user does the "mouse down" action. That complicates trying to click and drag a file from one window to another. That is a fundamental action that means that users can't move data into applications quite as easily on Linux as they can on the Mac.
Raising windows on mouse down lowers latency for that action, which is much more common than the edge case of dragging from a partially covered window to one that would be covered if the original window was raised.
> The point he was really trying to make, though, is that the desktop UX had not really changed in 20 years. There were plenty of new ideas and improvements in the 1980s and 1990s, ""and then it just stabilized, and not much has really changed"".
That's good and expected. When a technology matures then improvements become more and more incremental and less and less things you'd recogize as big change. I don't need or want some mighty designer disrupting my workflow with grand new ideas how things should work.
> Much of the UX for Linux systems was originally copied from Windows and the Mac, ""KDE even says it's for Windows users, that it wants to be similar to Windows for users"".
Much but far from all. He's really underplaying the window management improvements like soft-tiling that e.g. KDE has brought to the table and which were subsequently (badly) copied by Windows and not the other way around.
> Jenson theorized that the reason there are so many desktop environments, window managers, and Wayland compositors for Linux—as well as alternative clipboard managers—is because the desktop isn't quite working right for users.
No, it's because "right" is not a constant across all users.
> He noted that the center of a widescreen monitor is good for working with an application, but it becomes more difficult to work on the sides of the monitor. ""It's good for peripheral vision, but not good for working"".
I don't agree with that premise at all - in fact, having at least two widescreen monitors is the bare minimum for developers around me.
Also all the AI detours are just distracting and worst case betray the real motivation. No, you don't actually HAVE to address AI in every talk dude.
And no, the semantic desktop, just like the semantic web, did not fail for primarily technical reasons but because its a solution in search of a problem.
The issue with KDE is not the "UX", the issue is the crashiness and jank, which is an issue of C++ and the OOP-ness of Qt, respectively and no amount of philosophizing will fix that. Users can excuse high memory usage, users can excuse low FPS, users cannot excuse jank and crashes.
It is very hard to pin down the problems with Qt because on the one hand you can produce well-working UIs with QML if you are committed to it, see Telegram which has a near-perfect UX and I've never had it crash on me. But I think this is more of a cultural problem: KDE is spread thin, has no real leadership and tries to create a "inoffensive medium" of a desktop that pleases "everyone".
What would be better is a) finally ditching Qt Widgets completely and using QML for everything across all applications, b) moving towards a more functional-reactive approach and getting rid of the OOP mindset inherited from Qt Widgets (which fuses visual and domain data) - hard to achieve with Qt and c) requiring the developers to use some version of Windows and macOS in between, because it happens often with Linux users that they get "blind" to their own issues habitually, they need to experience what 90% of the world uses, so then they can take the good ideas to KDE. But if you use Linux 100% of the time, obviously it'll be "the best" because you're so used to its jank.
Also, develop a target audience. He hates on Omarchy in the video, but at least Omarchy has a target audience: the agentic-first, keyboard-first hypebro libertarian SaaS web developer. Okay, maybe a niche audience but at least that's something. KDEs target audience is... "everyone". Which then results in a "mid" desktop which just has to be worshipped by the fact that "it's open-source". And now, apparently the target has switched to "corporate users / governments". I'll say this is a bad idea because that's like an abusive relationship, you have constant bureaucracy, have to agree with their politics and views, have tons of red tape and low IT literacy. But at least it's "a" target audience, better than pleasing "everyone".
I will believe KDE cares about UX once they finally fix the clock to have the same font size for date and time, like Windows does it - first rule you learn in web design is to not use too many font sizes and KDE immediately breaks a very basic UX rule and has inconsistent font sizes everywhere. Then afterwards, they need to learn about stem widths and why using "1px borders" and thin fonts is not exactly the best thing for readability or low-resolution monitors. There's just so much wrong with KDE and Qt, architecturally and visually, that the "bad UX" problem is just a downstream result and I don't think a glorified Stage View will fix this.
Don't touch my stuff objections run strong. Three things: it's a chicken & egg problem, agents help fix this, and third the 'some assembly required' issue.
Some backdrop, a thesis: tech used to be exciting because there was apparent motion, things changing. The dread hadn't set in, and I think that dread set in because tech shifted from close intimiate and touchable technologies we could touch, to far off systems running in some cloud data center/keep. Change was fun when we got to be on for the ride and feel some ownership but change happening to us was annoying.
So lately, it's hard for anyone to know what their preferences really are. We aren't trying a ton of human empowering things. The organizational systems Scott talks about here? We see some absolutely ferverously dedicated people enjoying Niri, enjoying new infinite space tiling systems. That's a rare example though! A couple people stumble their way into it. There's not that WinCustomize era where it's apparent people are active and busy and rebuilding, remixing their world on and on. People aren't in a receiving trying mode, because in part there's not a ton to try, and because there's no scene, people aren't kicking out new things either. The social poverty of the area & lack of things to look forward to mean people aren't looking, and people trying stuff are lucky to get traction, even when it's good.
This admits some of the "don't touch my stuff." Because we haven't been seeing as much upside to change. But also: it's pathetic! These peole have had their spirits crushed and have no peers out there who are having fun, so they can just wallow in their grumpiness. And we need to kind of ignore these users, because they don't know: they think they want not even faster horses but merely horses that stop breaking down or which start only turning left unless you pay premium. Let these naysayers and grumps alone. But more than anything: show the people you can reach good stuff! Activate interests! Try to restore a sense of motion & exciting change! Create more powerful, richer, more beautiful systems!
Agents help though. Change sucks when it gets in the way. The downsides though are lower than ever, if you have systems flexible enough to let agents work them. If something changes in a way you don't like, an agent may well be able to make quick work of it! Tell it, and it'll go fix it.
Last: the granularity of build it yourself systems is not great. Downloading Sway, a desktop shell atop it,then a launcher, then a host of other small utilities to cobble together is a lot of decision making to do, and most of these options for these roles have lots of competitors with little interoperability. The tools that makeup the desktop stand alone, small pieces, and it's up to you to pick each one and loosely couple it, with it's bespoke means of doing so. These patterns of assembly suck. There's significant money heading towards a new omakase system, and I don't think it's necessarily the authoritarianism/fascism per se, the desperation for authority to make sense of the world, but given how scattered the pieces are, I have some sympathy for why they want someone to say they've built the beautiful well hewn omakase thing. And that your agent can customize it.
One of my favorite examples for a system that does compose nicely is astronvim on neovim. It takes some well known very great core plugins for nvim, and builds a little zellij like mini-framework to nvim's tmux atop that: a visual leader key, with menu system builtin. It creates a framework for more to plug into. And then the community has lots and lots of plugins or packs of plugins that it takes from upstream plugins everywhere, and it packages them for astronvim. Hundreds if not thousands of plugins. Most require not that much extra to hook in nicely in to the framework, to make them more apparent, visual, seen in the broader system. The system composes capabilities into itself nicely, integrates. Where-as when you get a regular nvim plugin, it usually can assume either nothing or way too much about what kind of nvim it runs on. It has to define it's own world. I think astronvim is an incredible model for making common layers for assembly, and it's packs show something inbetween a single plugin and an app: it's a unit of software that aggregates a couple other modules, yet is shy of being a full app. That kind of composability of experiences is unique and special: not having to assemble every piece ourselves, and yet not having an entire massive system dropped on us. Figuring out how to deliver better units of capabilities, composable subsystems, is really missing on the desktop and is much needed.
Once more- allow people to build "AI"-pipes, by recombining programs and agents via GUI.
[Agent: Fetch cat pictures from the internet] >GetFromFolder> [Agent: Filter for Calicos] >> [Agent: in Gimp paint Cat-Ears on Cats ] >> [Agent: Generated Videos] >> [Agent: Reupload to Youtube]
If you can make a "Explorer" with zero code and which allows to store and share building blocks and pipes, congrats.
It's interesting, but personally I think the idea of a singular desktop model is what is going to die, and we'll instead get workspaces that are a lot more malleable by user intent and preferences and changing and morphing as indiidual users preferences evolve.
I'm stating that on the basis of having Codex mutate my WM while using it (just restarting it without restarting my session) to do things like adding two layer desktops, and snapshotting desktop state, resuming with the applications I want.
There's nothing special about any of that, but what is a bit special is describing a change in desktop behaviour I want, have it churn for a bit and for my live desktop to seamlessly change.
Being able to do that makes it meaningless to lock users into a pre-defined desktop model any more.
The meta problem with all this desktop UX design discussion is that it's not actually very problem driven.
Many of us solve our UI problems and we land into our own happy minima.
Many of the UX "solutions" are either invented problems or not my problems or worse, grinding some anti-me agenda.
Like many, a lot of my UX improvements have been to simplify the UI. Tiling, with just a few windows per virtual desktop in herbstluftwm: kitty, emacs, browser and some rare transient application (usually PDF or image viewer).
The idea in the screen shot horrifies me. Why would I buy an expensive high pixel monitor just to use only 10% of it to display a single window? Why would I want to waste CPU to animate the migration of a full window to a single button icon (another example given)?
These UI "innovations" are great for movie props but do they actually help in reality? Not that I see. The "stagnation" of UI to me is more a plateau. Anything truly new must be driven by new "I", no input/output channels between user and computer.
The one interesting idea I saw in the article was Lifestreams. I think storage and recall is something that needs improvement and new ideas because for me that is a problem. I produce and consume too much info while recalling it is hard and while also I often do not produce or consume info that I wish I had.
Again, it's the I/O that drives the progress.