Ideas on modernizing the open-source desktop

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.

• userbinator · 3 hours ago

  True revolution in UX will come from making customisation accessible ...like it was back in the days when Windows actually had a very customisable UI[1], and then the "skinnable" UIs of the early 2000s (most of which were extremely gaudy, but then again, maybe that was what the majority of the population wanted.) Now it has devolved into little more than this: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/experience/perso... [1] and one of the included color schemes was indeed crazy, but a good demonstration of what was available: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46247605

• WCSTombs · 3 hours ago

  The difference between big-company and FLOSS UX design, including profit-motivated behaviors (a bit indirectly, but it's definitely there), is specifically addressed in the article, so I don't think that's a very fair characterization. I actually agree about customization, but that's only part of it, and seems to be pretty orthogonal to what the article is talking about. You can only customize to features that are actually implemented by the system, and coming up with those seems like the harder problem.

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

Please give me the option to not use the, "Innovations."

• SA9G · 3 hours ago

  I remember Windows trying to look like my smartphone screen a few years back... that was when I switched to Ubuntu!

  • someonebaggy · 2 hours ago

    By a few years, you mean more than ten. Halfway between now and windows XP.

• pizzaiolo · 2 hours ago

  The was by far the most common type of comment I saw on this topic on Reddit. Do people think they'll be held at gunpoint?

  • someonebaggy · 2 hours ago

    No, but they think it'll be standard on all major distros and alternatives will be abandoned, and there's precedent for this (systemd, gnome 3).

> He thought that it would be possible to do the things he was demonstrating with Wayland as it is today. Yeah, with that AND The cooperation and rewrite of every app to actually support usecases like "if dragged to side of screen, get smaller and smaller eventually becoming a widget"

> 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.

• someonebaggy · 2 hours ago

  Here's another thing that's just completely ignored: touchpad as anything other than a mouse replacement. It's possible for a touchpad to allow things like pinch-to-zoom, but nobody's really doing that. You could even use it as a low res painting tablet.

• fabian2k · 1 hour ago

  I think the big issue is that the user doesn't have a choice in many cases. Windows obviously doesn't give the user a choice, they made the start menu much shittier and you had to live with it or go away. Popular distributions like Ubuntu also focus on one desktop environment, and it's often not easy to switch (it's possible of course, but at least when I tried it a long time ago just installing a different desktop wasn't enough). Making it easier to choose allows for much more experimentation. I'm using Niri right now, which certainly isn't something you can just give users as a default.

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.

• jauntywundrkind · 2 hours ago

  Good suggestions yes. Strong ideas. Ultimately the desktop has been content to let the apps take over more and more, while not extending itself. Actually making the OS something that actual activity happens on feels absolutely essential. Making a Raycast/Vicinae (the pretty great open source port) integral feels like it would go a long way towards this end, of offering a consistent way to expose & access the toolbox. I'd love to see an agentic OS where the OS and apps can both talk in terms of MCP things like resources, tools, skills. Yes these are primarily geared towards agents, but they are also acceptable machine-to-machine interfaces to script against too (so long as the type signature remains compatible). Android's Intents feel related, similar-ish. It's a pity no one bit on PK's WebIntents. That could have been an interesting way to create abstractions for intents, for activities, for stuff happening on the computer. Notably the xopc actually had activities and a journal that let apps contribute meaningful intent to the OS as a whole. But mostly it just ended up as a history viewer there. Android mostly uses intents as a launcher. But this idea of having the activities of the system as available abstractions could go much further.

• csnover · 2 hours ago

  > 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. So I’m looking at the Raycast web site, and aside from the UI being a little different, Raycast seems like it is itself a clone of the already long-existing KDE Plasma start menu (Kickoff) and KRunner? I guess the only thing missing from the KDE one is “AI”. Is there something I am missing about how Raycast is some innovation not already realised in the Linux desktop? > 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. Extended attributes[0] already exist if you want. But, as the linked wiki page indicates, filesystem attributes are fragile. And what is the tangible benefit? In practice, users can already just dump all their files into a random directory and use Baloo or whatever. Which is probably better anyway since it’s easier to have a D-Bus API with multiple user-space implementations than having to wipe and reformat to use a different filesystem if you have some problem with it. [0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Extended_attributes

  • jauntywundrkind · 2 hours ago

    Raycast is successful because it's an incredibly widely used and adopted integration layer. The official repo has thousands of plugins, pretty well maintained together, collectively, and there are thousands more out there. https://github.com/raycast/extensions/tree/main/extensions KDE krunner has plugins. But there is not afaik a big tent ownership system like Raycast. And krunner is only going to attract KDE users. Raycast is mainly mac, but also, there's Vicinae which runs on a lot more systems, and it can run >50% of the Raycast plugins without a sweat, is designed to be drop in compatible. It's also absurdly easy to write Raycast extensions. It uses web platform technologies that "just work", that don't have ornery toolchains and need lots of dev libraries installed. With KRunner you can probably use whatever library you want to do whatever you want, which is good, but hard, where-as with Raycast there's a pretty comprehensive and powerful API that offers a ton, that is well defined, and that other plugins will show you the way on. https://developers.raycast.com/

    • t_mahmood · 1 hour ago

      And it's a 3rd party app that can pull the rug anytime without any consequence.

      • jauntywundrkind · 52 minutes ago

        Vicinae works great and is compatible with most plugins, ye FUD grump. It's what I use every day!

  • malmz · 2 hours ago

    Raycast is krunner but with better UI, more features and more flexibility from plugin.

    • t_mahmood · 1 hour ago

      KRunner also has plugins, Gnome Also has search extensions, without depending on a 3rd party app that might pull the rug anytime.

• t_mahmood · 1 hour ago

  Last thing I would want AI running on my desk and doing unpredictable things. I love my silly simple Gnome desk or barebones i3 with everything mapped to my preference. I can search and enter my search, and expect same results everytime, so muscle memory friendly. Gnome's search does calculation in search just fine, or search files, no need of any models. And app can provide their own search endpoint that gnome uses, to search in the app. Repetable, simple, and light. Its boring, but hey, your everyday thing that is your starting point of the day do not need random behavior, or getting dependent on some 3rd party app that suddenly pulls the rug from under you. This everything AI is so tiring.

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.

• Terr_ · 1 hour ago

  > 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, If we go further into the metaphor of a desktop, there would be sections for tools and sections for pending work. The inkwell versus the blotter, if you will. But then, well, what difference is there between a designated permanent zone of the desktop for non-tools, versus a regular window showing some contents of a folder, which the user has chosen to position above an empty area?

• Mikhail_Edoshin · 37 minutes ago

  On old Macs you could drag files and folders on the desktop, work from there, and then put them back where they belonged with a single command, one by one or all at once. Applications used file IDs to refer to them, so all references kept working (not only with the desktop, but with all moves and renames). But old Macs had a different filesystem; modern filesystems are probably not fit for that.

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.

• eddythompson80 · 2 hours ago

  I don’t know man, Linux desktop in the 90s was extremely rough. It wasn’t until the 2000s with KDE 2 (though really 3 IMO) and GNOME 2 that Linux desktop started showing promise. It was then subsequently dragged down with many alternatives and infighting. Personally I think only KDE kept slowly progressing better. I didn’t even like KDE until GNOME 3 pushed me to it. Every now and then I try GNOME 3 to see where it’s at, and just get baffled by the choices they make. Both Windows and Mac also had baffling choices along the way (in terms of desktop UX). Windows more so obviously, but they both would course correct every now and then. GNOME seems laser focused on some desktop UX vision I can’t even begin to understand.

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?

• TonyStr · 1 hour ago

  Could be because this promotes a bad UX? In GNOME, you have a dock for your most used applications, which can be launched or navigated to with Super+1/2/3.., there is the apps menu accessible with Super or by clicking the top bar, where you can organize apps as well as search for them. Desktop icons are distracting, and requires you to remove windows obstructing them to access the icons. If every DE just mimicked windows, we wouldn't ever be able to move forward. Though KDE is there for you if you prefer the windows way.

  • someonebaggy · 1 hour ago

    Can you show me the studies that show it's bad UX for the reasons you said? KDE doesn't let you do it either. You can only put desktop widgets on your KDE desktop.

    • TonyStr · 19 minutes ago

      I don't have a study that I can use as an appeal to authority, so you'll just have to contend with the argument on the basis of it's internal consistency and how much you agree with the premises :) For what it's worth, I don't use the gnome app drawer either. I exclusively use the dock + search to launch applications, so in my workflow both are actually pointless. I would still argue that opening the app drawer to reach your application shortcuts is easier and more consistent than resizing/minimizing windows to un-obstruct the desktop until you can point and click to launch an application. But I suppose managing folders on your desktop could be viewed as a plus? I'm not sure if GNOME's app menu supports that. >KDE doesn't let you do it either My bad. I'm not too familiar with KDE.

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.

• XorNot · 1 hour ago

  I also need an easy backup strategy for it. I want a single file blob somewhere I can throw in Syncthing l, and have it get backed up to the cloud.

  • exe34 · 37 minutes ago

    configuration.nix is that file for me. I gave up entirely on desktops and panels, and instead use xmonad and dmenu. I've had to adapt to exactly zero change in my ux in ten years. For me, enrichment comes from studying and experimenting, not from adapting every month or two to things that make somebody else feel good about changing.

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.

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.

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.

• XorNot · 2 hours ago

  I mean I'd love if toolbars would stay and people would stop messing with window decorations. I want boring consistency.

  • Gigachad · 1 hour ago

    Toolbars themselves aren’t the issue, it’s too much crap dumped in them, especially when it’s a bunch of very rarely used tools. And especially when it’s multiple layers of toolbars like a 2006 Internet Explorer. Over the last decade we have seen programs like libreoffice and gimp not really do anything while others like Blender have had massive overhauls pushing the frontier of UI.

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?

• realusername · 1 hour ago

  They only superficially look similar but have nothing to do with Windows or MacOS on the feeling

  • potato-peeler · 1 hour ago

    I am not talking about the UX, I am talking about the layout.

• nakedneuron · 1 hour ago

  no mention of Arcan yet, so I'll throw that in the ring.. https://arcan-fe.com/about/ personally I think we need to shift from the 'file location' paradigm to tagging (thinking xattr).. that will solve many problems with UI (also raise some for sure).

  • iamcalledrob · 16 minutes ago

    Something I learnt from doing research in this space is that spatial memory is quite powerful, and a hierarchical filesystem taps into that. Whereas tagging doesn't align as naturally with the human brain in the same way.

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".

• robinsonb5 · 18 minutes ago

  I've avoided that bug throughout more than 20 years of Linux usage just by disabling raise-on-click. (Except of course the Gnome folks did they utmost to make that option unavailable back in the Gnome 2 days: Metacity's raise-on-click gconf setting was hobbled so that it could only be disabled in focus-follows-mouse mode. That bit of idiocy was patched out years ago, but the obnoxious text that accompanied it survived in Marco until earlier this year!)

> 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

• diegocg · 1 hour ago

  KDE has clipboard history, for the record. Persistent across reboots. I can't understand why it's not more prevalent

  • Quartzium · 1 hour ago

    I think that's clear text somewhere on the disk (I guess SSD these days). Might contain sensitive data, I'm not keen on it.

• melvinroest · 1 hour ago

  > Clipboard history, but also just "oh you have these windows open while working on this task". I feel this. When I first got to learn what a workspace was (in Eclipse, of all things), and I really drilled down into the English meaning of it (I'm Dutch), I thought about exactly what you're describing right now.

  • rtpg · 1 hour ago

    Yep. There's also a thing of wanting "http referer"-style things but at the desktop. I want things that tell me _from where_ I clicked into a page in the browser (like "oh you got here from Slack (at this spot)" Desktop history, clipboard history... all associated to certain contexts. Would be quite nice IMO

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

this was eye opening, i like the idea of the grouping together stuff on a clipboard

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.

> 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. Linux software isn't lacking in UX design, it has made different tradeoffs and that's OK and often even a strength. > when I joined, we weren't evil; we were really trying to do the right thing Says everyone who worked for big tech ever. > 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.

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.

• magic_hamster · 26 minutes ago

  I like your ideas. Why not try to build it? You seem to know what you want. If you do, I'll definitely follow your work.

• opensandwich · 16 minutes ago

  100% agree, bring back LAN messenger, and p2p 'things'. I remember when Opera browser had the 'fridge' which was cool as well (Opera Unite). Theres definitely ideas here worth exploring for sure.

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.

> "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.

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

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_...

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.

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.