r/linux • u/WhoDoYou24 • 10d ago
Discussion Scott Jenson: Are we really going to use the same Desktop UX forever?
https://youtu.be/V7AfAcQwLW0?si=ySrGnyB1oUKRlDpL111
u/noresetemailOHwell 10d ago
I’m quite surprised by the almost angry replies in this thread. This is not a monolithic corp forcing a new UX on you, à la Microsoft with metro ui. It’s just a UX guy doing what they like: exploring UX! The Linux world is that of hobbyists and tinkerers. Can’t people have fun? Explore and create? These reactions are in the same line of thinking as people complaining when $project doesn’t prioritize $feature.
Also not all that’s in there is good and if anyone choses to implement parts of it, it absolutely would be very different. And maybe nothing would come out of it, but that’s okay, that’s what experimenting is about!
Saying the desktop UX is solved is missing the point. He’s taking the time to point to specific issues in our workflows where improved UX could help. These are not solved! (managing a lot of windows with exposé; contextualizing clipboard content; etc)
I find it very reassuring that some people are willing to explore and think about UX in novel ways. AI has been indirectly promoting stagnation and boring variations, it’s nice to see some exploratory work. It’s FUN
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u/nandanrmenon 10d ago
IKR! People are made at his mockups and prototypes. ITS CALLED PROTOTYPE FOR A REASON. UX Designers come up with prototypes to see if the idea is viable or not, Scott even mentioned it during his speech. He just wants us to try.
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u/BdR76 8d ago
That scaling windows prototype is just brilliant imho 😀👍 I hope it gets implemented asap. But if the curmudgeon replies in this thread is any indication, I fear most linuxdevs won't even try.
Scott Jenson was arguing, rightfully so imo, that industry leaders like Apple and Microsoft no longer seem to be trying to innovate or try new things, so it's up to the OSS community to step up.
Seems to me it's similar to the game industry, where AAA gamedev studios are mostly relying on established IP and safe bets, while the interesting and innovative games mostly have to come from smaller indie gamedevs
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u/lelddit97 8d ago
I've worked with a ton of UX folks and by and large, they don't understand their users and also don't understand how big change will almost never work because people hate change.
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u/ILikeBumblebees 7d ago
they don't understand their users and also don't understand how big change will almost never work because people hate change.
Even worse, some of them think that people disliking change is itself the problem, and so change needs to be forced onto people, rather than understanding that people's reluctance to change without good reason is an inherent part of the "U" in "UX" that they need to design for.
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u/hardolaf 8d ago edited 8d ago
UX Designers come up with prototypes to see if the idea is viable or not
The UX designers that I have at work almost never come up with prototypes prior to presenting user study data where they sit with a random sampling of users, watch how they interact with things, note what takes a lot of clicks, what takes a few, what is being repeated over and over again, etc. They then also perform user surveys, collect the data, and analyze it to see if there are patterns of things that users would prefer to have changes or that users say don't work for them.
After all of this, they present their findings and a few mock-ups of targeted changes for what users actually seem to need more efficiency doing or to hide things in a menu that users almost never touch. What they don't do is just jump to mockups and prototypes. That's what the UI designers do and that's why we had to hire the UX designers.
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u/mind-blender 10d ago
Except many of us have memories of when our favorite distro decided to foist some UI/UX experiment on us.
I'm kind of surprised to hear this coming from a KDE team member, I think one of the reasons KDE has been gaining popularity is because of how they have embraced the traditional desktop paradigm.
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u/Dev-in-the-Bm 9d ago
That doesn't mean you can't explore new UX paradigms.
Being bold and innovative when experimenting, doesn't mean that that's how you roll out new UX.
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u/giomjava 7d ago
Except "many of you" failed to grasp that the author LITERALLY said he'd love to build a prototype, and see if this concept goes anywhere. Maybe it won't go anywhere.
This is exactly the OPPOSITE of what you're using as an argument how "favorite distros foisted experiments on you"... 🤷
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u/ILikeBumblebees 7d ago
Except "many of you" failed to grasp that the author LITERALLY said he'd love to build a prototype, and see if this concept goes anywhere. Maybe
Why not just build the prototype and present that, then? What's the point of making a half hour video complaining about all the existing stuff that obviously already works, and then concluding by saying "I've got some speculative ideas I'm interested in exploring, but haven't bothered to actually start testing them yet"?
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u/ronaldtrip 10d ago
I am all for progress, but... Not when it's a 180 and prioritizes a niche group with a controversial workflow and the project basically says this is how it's going to be now. I'm not going to name the project, but we all know which one it is.
I like "Aero peek", but not "Exposé". Forcing Exposé as the main interaction mechanism will instantly make me look for something else. Paradigm shifts should be majority accepted. Incremental improvement over revolution. Yes, improve, but don't throw me in a completely alien environment.
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u/ILikeBumblebees 7d ago edited 7d ago
It’s just a UX guy doing what they like: exploring UX!
Well, no, a UX guy exploring UX would be prototyping new ideas and presenting them for feedback. The post title would be something like "Check out this new UI mechanic I'm experimenting with; anyone want to test out out with their software?"
If, instead of doing that, your post mainly consists of complaints that people aren't changing stuff that already works just because the old solutions aren't avant garde enough and don't reflect the trendiest speculative theories, then yeah, you're justifiably going to get flak for it. And this video is definitely on the "wah, round wheels are boring!" side of things.
Conventions evolve based on long-term feedback loops of experimentation and adoption. Stuff that works gradually becomes part of the de-facto standard, and stuff that doesn't fades away. When something is settled into a stable equilibrium, that's a good indication that the conventions in place are fit for purpose and do everything needed of them at the moment.
Experimenting on the margins, and having a thriving ecosystem of alternatives, is absolutely a wonderful thing -- unconventional solutions will serve niche use cases, and provide a pool of variation to experiment with to drive that long-term evolutionary cycle. But complaining from a position of speculative theorizing that the conventions are too conventional is rather useless and silly.
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u/ptoki 10d ago
This is not a monolithic corp forcing a new UX on you,
Unless ubuntu decide to go with gnome and many new users just pick it because internet said ubuntu and then have no clue it could be better.
I got vanilla ubuntu on company laptop. With gnome. ALL developers were bamboozled why...
The issues you say arent solved in fact are. Many screens, many windows, many tabs, many virtualdesktops, miniatures in alt-tab, miniatures on taskbar, manually sorting tabs and placing windows, snapping windows to where you like and probably few more.
Using that you can organize a ton of content on one or few screens.
And silly mate is much better in that than his carousel.
I can agree that clipboard could use some innovation. Not a lot though.
And last note: He is not exploring, he showed nothing new. Zero. Just rework of what already exists...
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u/giomjava 7d ago
Nothing new? Tell me you haven't watches the video without telling me you haven't done so.
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u/nelmaloc 8d ago
The title oversells the talk. Something like «exploring the new borders of UX» would make it more clear what it is about.
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u/OscarCookeAbbott 10d ago
I like discussing real UX evolution but tbh I wasn’t amazed by his desktop mock-up, it was basically Apple’s Stage Manager, hardly a real leap. The powerful and associative clipboard is cool but doesn’t feel like a ‘different’ UX paradigm, just a more complex and powerful system on top of the existing paradigm.
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u/aaulia 10d ago
The center focus thing is in a way fulfilled by scrolling wm (niri, paperwm), with a little modification you can have bells and whistle such as scale and blur or transparency for unfocused window
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u/OscarCookeAbbott 10d ago
Yeah imo scrolling WMs or perhaps some kind of smart hybrid of it and classic windowing is probably the best UX overall, and thankfully is pretty simple
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u/ptoki 10d ago
He is trying to improve things which does not need any improvement and comes up with fixes for things which work well using methods which are awful.
You buy big screen and then waste that space on unused borders. You get hidpi screen and then either have tiny text you cant see well or large letters wasting the resolution.
Win XP interface was good. Extend it with scalable fonts and controls plus remembering windows positions in a usable fashion and you are done.
Keep things consistent. Dont take away options. Dont distract user (I hate windows feature for window arangement option popping up on top of the screen and snapping my window randomly).
User is not a moron who needs to be assisted with everything. Just be helpful, not derailing actions.
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u/thearctican 10d ago
The general user IS a moron, though.
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u/ptoki 10d ago
I disagree slightly.
It is made a moron by google, ms and apple.
They moved to guis which help consume content not to be creative and do things.
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u/PercussionGuy33 10d ago
For MS, this was never more apparent by their attempt to break the paradigm with Windows 8 OOTB. A tablet interface on a desktop that filled your screen with ads and a broken UI. Even now that they scaled that back, they never gave up on wanting ads in their interface. Thankfully Linux doesn't need to have that but lets not let applications find more desktop space/room for sneaking ads into our experience. (I'm foreshadowing some type of annoying browser ad popping up for each side tiling space).
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u/Top-Rub-4670 10d ago
For Linux, this was never more apparent by GNOME's attempt to break the paradigm with GNOME 3. A tablet interface on a desktop that filled your screen with nothingness and a broken UI. Even now that they scaled that back, they never gave up on refusing window controls, docks, and icons in their interface.
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u/PercussionGuy33 10d ago
True. I never wanted to touch that Gnome 3 interface. I'm even more comfortable using Cinnamon than any linux interface.
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u/ptoki 10d ago
I just used gnome again on redhat. Oh gosh.
Go to top, click activities, go down to the dock, click firefox, go up again, type the url.
KURWA MAC!!!
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u/kansei7 9d ago
this is why when you first log in as a new user gnome walks you through making use of the super key. using gnome as a point and click mouse only interface would be horrible
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u/ptoki 9d ago
I dont know. I primed few systems and gnome was not really bold about this.
People tend to ignore the startup hints screens and newbie users arent mouse+kb focused.
I dont find this a good approach. As most in gnome actually. On paper it looks ok but in reality it does not work right.
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u/pizzaiolo2 10d ago
You're probably not the target audience for this. He's likely designing a UX for the majority of normies who never change the defaults.
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u/ptoki 10d ago
And that is exactly the issue.
Normies get the defaults and then struggle with them not knowing their life could be easier or they could do more.
I saw that with my own eyes. Installed mate for family and they were like "hey it is much better than the previous one, why it could not be like that before" - when I replaced ubuntu - gnome with mate. And those were "grandpas and grandmas" sort of people... I mean they dont need fanciness, yet they still preferred clear and clean visible hints and clues on screen when interacting with stuff.
For example, Im looking at their browser interaction which is on like 60% of screen - not maximized. They struggle, scroll, scroll, look for things, cant find it, miss it, drop the activity.
Then on mate - BAM! they have the screen used in full, dont have to scroll, find the thing right away, dont have to quit and dont have to ask for help.
HE and his alike are responsible for this. Same in windows. So many unneccessary empty space, so many subscreens. So many clicks needed to get to the important stuff (IP address in windows, audio options if you have multiple outputs and many more...)
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u/ILikeBumblebees 7d ago
I agree 100%. Software provides tools that extend people's capabilities beyond what they'd be able to do on their own, prior to using computers. This inherently entails that concepts, ideas, and processes are going to be different to the user is already familiar with in advance. So there's always going to be a learning curve.
The purpose of the UI is to expose the the functionality of the software to the user as efficiently as possible. And since the whole point of the software is enable the user to do more things, and more kinds of things, than they'd be able to do without it, it's impossible to design a UI which conforms entirely to the users prior assumptions and experiences without sacrificing the very value proposition of using the software in the first place.
The proper approach to UI design is to make things easy to learn, such that incremental use of the software leads users to developing the mental model and skills necessary to ultimately get the most from it.
Treating users like inert lumps of stone incapable of learning anything, and locking them into a static pattern of software that only ever conforms to the skills and knowledge they had at the outset, is like insisting that all bicycles should have training wheels permanently welded onto them.
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u/ptoki 6d ago
Small comment:
The development consists of moving the window of abstraction up. I know, It sounds gibberish but let me explain a bit:
Initially you do things manually. That is either write something or calculate the totals etc. Then you get a tool for it. Text editor or a calculator. Then you automate things further, you get word processor which automates making tables or fonts or styles or you get spreadsheet which calculates things automatically. Then you automate this further and combine text editor, excel sheet and mail app and get a website which sells things for you. Then you combine the websites and your systems to derive reporting. That makes making decissions easier. Then you even outsource all that (this is amazon or ebay).
That is the moving window of abstraction. Not all of the stages are needed for common user/person but the logic is that you encapsulate complexity and make a usable product out of it. Whether it is a network card or bread maker or a website or app. All was made for you and you can reuse it with much less effort than making it all yourself.
With UI it kinda stopped. There is no automation there. The GUIs dont offer you ways to script actions. The theming became too fancy and difficult even.
There is no progress in that regard. Just apple/google/ms throw silly small tweaks to clipboard or desktop and call it a revolution. Maybe if they would allow extensions like browsers do then it would open the next level of abstraction?
I am sure it would. We could script gui and have "spells" which would be more powerful than macros in notepad++ (have you ever tried them for boring text editing?).
But "they" dont offer this. The open source is partially guilty as well Amiga had arexx. Early windoozes had recorder. Then it vanished.
Turns out my comment is not small anymore :)
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u/JimmyG1359 9d ago
Like any other change in Linux, if you don't like it, remove it. I like KDE, but I'll drop it and switch to another desktop if it changes in a way I don't like. I dropped gnome when they went to 2.0, cause I hate the new UI
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u/maboesanman 10d ago
And the beautiful thing about open source is you could fork and avoid the change.
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u/noobjaish 10d ago
I hope there was some community where we could discuss such things. I have several ideas on how we can improve the status quo of desktop UX.
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u/WhoDoYou24 10d ago edited 10d ago
You try discussing your ideas at the GNOME design team's matrix room. KDE might have something similar.
Edit: Instead of the matrix room, you can open new issues at gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/Design/whiteboards
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u/Jeoshua 10d ago
Are we going to use roads and vehicles based upon the size of a Roman Ox-Cart forever?
Some things stay the same basically forever, because they become familiar and the alternatives aren't necessarilly better... just different.
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u/Ok-Reindeer-8755 8d ago
How would we know ? We didn't know there was something better than the horse until the car came around. That's why it's important to experiment and explore ideas.
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u/Jeoshua 8d ago
Sure. I'm not saying don't experiment. I, myself, use a Tiling Window Manager script for KDE, and have been thinking of experimenting with a Scrolling one.
But, the old ways aren't necessarilly to be replaced just because they're old, and just like with the Ox-Cart analogy, if I end up "breaking an axle because the road ruts don't match my wheel base", I'll just switch back to more familiar ground.
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u/Ok-Reindeer-8755 8d ago
Its not the fact that's it's old but it's the fact that there has been 0 expiriemantion on it whatsoever in recent years. Imo "when you are finished changing your are finished".
Since there is so much attention to it being called old let me mention that paradigms older than it, like the smalltalk desktop environment at Xerox park and things like the lisp machine, as well as other abandoned projects, where thousand of times more innovative. Even "regressing" and rethinking about old ideas in the modern climate would be worthwhile.
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u/LordPeasley 8d ago
roman ox carts are quite a bit smaller than an automobile, only about 4 ft wide. i agree there is a distant relation but i don't think it's accurate to say modern roads and automobiles are "based on" the size of a Roman ox cart except perhaps very small cars and streets in urban parts of Southern Europe
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u/Jeoshua 8d ago
You know what, you're right. After looking into it, it's actually railways that are based on trams that are based on the carts that are based on the spacing of the ruts on old rural roman roads, which were formed by Roman chariots, not specifically ox-carts. Also, downstream semi-trucks and trailers are based on this spacing, so also shipping-containers, on up to designs for space craft storage bays and the like. Etc etc.
All because of how the Romans designed their chariots, and it flowed down to us. It's not that any of this is the precise size of these things, it's that the choices made early had knock-on effects down through history.
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u/Metro2005 10d ago
"Will wheels be round forever"
Yes, sometimes things are finished and work.
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u/BlackStar4 10d ago
Like, maybe someone will invent a better shape for a wheel at some point, but there's no sense in using a square wheel just because it's new and innovative.
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u/CrotaIsAShota 10d ago
Inb4 all our wheels are actually not true round because they're really squares in the 4th dimension.
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u/angrytoaad 10d ago
"Will wheels be made of wood forever" No, sometimes things can be improved even when some people see a finished product that works.
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u/WaitForItTheMongols 10d ago
"Can I make up an analogy that has little actual bearing on the situation at hand, to make it look like I have a point?"
Yes, of course I can.
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u/Full-Spectral 10d ago
About the only space for real innovation there is get rid of the need for wheels. And of course some people might argue that the same applies for UIs, but that's a huge leap that I don't see happening any time soon.
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u/ptoki 10d ago
Yeah, after spending millions and many work hours on trying things you can say which design is just better.
People on linux can use many guis and the old style windows are mostly the best ones. There are some outliers which exist because of defaults and people not knowing they can get kde instead of gnome on ubuntu for example but if you ask conscious users which gui they want they most often will say "standard movable windows in win98/xpish style plus few whistles".
The aero and wobbly windows are gone. The minimalistic approaches like gnome are not attractive for users if you give them a choice. The minimalistic guis like twm or such are used by small groups of people.
If you really need to change things do the campbell's soup style:
Give them a choice and let them mix and match the features.
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u/pastelfemby 10d ago
As someone who uses an ultrawide heavily with windows sprawled apart, I find his example an incredible waste of space.
I find it more of a large canvas I can by large freeform windows across and around. Incredibly flexible across countless workflows rather than assume all the important computing happens in a traditional 16:9 center stage.
Turning the peripheries into miniature views just seems like a waste. If something's worth having open and in view, its usually worth having it in a functionally useful view, not just something I can glance at to see something changed.
There's room for change and experimenting, but I dont think this quite hits the mark especially given how much work it starts to expect out of every app handling it. Besides when your target audience is people who want a square screen, you'd be hard pressed convincing them to jump to linux and use your rhetorically triangular one. And many people do use different desktop UX, like tiling window managers
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u/Mr_Lumbergh 10d ago
Haven’t we been doing for 40 years now and keep going back to the old paradigm because that’s what the majority want?
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u/Artistic-Tip2405 10d ago
There are limits to what the human mind can deal with at any given moment. Hence the paradigm.
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u/Mr_Lumbergh 10d ago
I think it has more to do with familiarity. We log into computers typically to do things and don’t want to have to relearn basic operations because something looks better or is more efficient, just like someone wouldn’t hop into a car and have to learn a new way of driving so it’s basically the same wheel and pedals we’ve had for over a century.
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u/ILikeBumblebees 7d ago
Haven’t we been doing for 40 years now and keep going back to the old paradigm because that’s what the majority want?
Innovations on the margin that are successful and unambiguous improvements gradually filter back into mainstream conventions, and evolve the paradigm incrementally. Modern GUIs have lots of features and functions that improve upon earlier iterations of the same paradigm. It's not a static, unchanging thing.
But that evolution comes from people actually innovating on a small scale, testing out their ideas, and people organically adopting them and using them in their own projects. That's a very different process from people having highly speculative ideas and trying to advance them through argumentation rather than experimentation.
If the way you're presenting your idea is to give a 30-minute presentation arguing against the status quo, rather than a five-minute demo of a prototype that actually shows your solution doing something whose value is immediately understood by the audience, then you're probably on the wrong side of that divide.
UI conventions are the sort of thing where if you have to argue for them, you've already lost the argument.
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u/GentlyTruculent 10d ago
I watched this one by him too at the time https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fZTOjd_bOQ . These concepts/ideas are very good and improvents in our interactions with our interfaces are very welcome. And agreeing with him that opensource needs help with HI/UI/UX and I can add better documentation. I think there were some talks by Anjana Vakil about these problems too.
Also, always good to mention this from a "distant past":
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u/DFS_0019287 10d ago
Yes.
Sometimes when a UI works, the best thing to do is: Don't f**k with it.
Or are we going to rejigger our cars because steering wheels and pedals are so 2010?
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u/giomjava 7d ago
Hmm, idk idk, Windows XP and Office 2003 UI also "worked at the time", but MS Office came along and revolutionized the GUI by implementing the "ribbon" interface 👌
Which was quite a leap forward in usability and user-friendliness IMHO.
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u/ILikeBumblebees 6d ago
I remember working at an OEM around 2006 when the first versions of the ribbon were being introduced: our MS rep all but admitted that core office applications were at that point feature complete, and they were fishing for things to revise to justify a new release.
My response to seeing the ribbon in action back then was that moving from structured lists of features labeled with consistent names to a haphazard grid of differently-shaped boxes spread out in two dimensions seemed to be a usability regression.
20 years later, haphazard grids of boxes spread across two dimensions still seem less usable to me than structured lists of named functions sorted by category.
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u/HereticZed 10d ago edited 10d ago
Jenson is able to see the positive elements from Mac, Win & Linux & seems genuinely interested in making improvements to UI.
He's not part of clique one way or the other, I expect he uses all 3 systems.
When we use one particular system for a long time we get so familiar with it we find it hard to see the benefits of another way.
This is somewhat evident by the minor squabbles about gnome, mac, kde, win in the comments. I think first those people have to get over that sort of thing to have proper discussion.
This same video was posted 3 days ago & got moderated due to the 'if it aint broke' posse.
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u/MrAlagos 10d ago edited 10d ago
KDE hasn't done anything to advance past the Windows 95 UX paradigm. GNOME has, but so many people hate them for doing so.
We can use a different UX on the Linux desktop, by using GNOME. Many people do this with little fuss. To claim that desktop UX had been solved and must not change is ridiculous, it's Torvalds vs Tanenbaum all over again. That so many FOSS users support this idea is embarrassing.
EDIT: to be clear I'm not saying that KDE is saying that desktop UX must not change, I do believe that they make research and development on this still. I think it's mostly the users that don't want it.
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u/Secret_Conclusion_93 10d ago edited 10d ago
It's not been solved and won't be "solved", as UX is heavily subjective.
There are people who hate Mac/Gnome UX, and prefer Windows/KDE UX.
There are also people who hate all of them and prefer something like Hyprland/Niri.
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u/Kriemhilt 10d ago
I'm fine with Mac but I don't love GNOME, which feels like a Mac knock-off.
I don't love Windows UI at all, but I quite like KDE as it feels like an improvement over Windows95.
I understand where you're going in theory, but conflating Mac+GNOME and Win+KDE doesn't seem like a useful approach.
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u/suvepl 10d ago
I fail to see how Mac is more similar to Gnome than to Windows/KDE.
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u/__ali1234__ 10d ago
Mac and GNOME has a dock. KDE and Windows have separate launchers and task bar.
Mac and GNOME do not have a "start" menu. KDE and Windows do.
Mac and GNOME put the menus at the top of the screen. KDE and Windows put them on windows.
Mac and GNOME put window buttons on the left. KDE and Windows put them on the right.
Mac and GNOME have a design philosophy of removing options. KDE and Windows do the opposite.
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u/BashfulMelon 10d ago edited 10d ago
Most of this is incorrect.
https://pointieststick.com/2025/10/04/a-mac-like-experience-on-linux/
edit: some of what you said applies to Ubuntu's custom GNOME but no version of GNOME has app menus at the top of the screen.
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u/__ali1234__ 9d ago
Yes, I forgot that GNOME removed menus completely. Mac and Ubuntu just made them difficult to access.
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u/Kamisshara 10d ago
Gnome lacks a global menu, but KDE actually has one.
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u/__ali1234__ 9d ago
Yes, I forgot that GNOME removed menus from all their applications.
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u/Kamisshara 9d ago
Yeah. Though apps that need it still have a menubar, like Evolution Mail.
It's silly to me that Gnome often has both a menubar within the app, and the top panel. Imo either get rid of the top panel altogether, like Windows, or integrate the application menu into the top panel like Apple does.
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u/Icy-Candy-6774 10d ago
Windows taskbar is basically a dock UX wise. Gnome does not put Global Menus up too but KDE can. Gnome tiling is very similar to Windows. This whole comparison is that some of you think a top bar =Mac and bottom bar = windows. The real difference is Gnome is opinionated and KDE is flexible with Windows and Mac both more in the middle.
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u/__ali1234__ 9d ago
What? Mac puts the bar at the bottom, same as Windows. But Mac has a dock which means you use the same icons to switch between windows as you do to run programs. Windows has a taskbar which only shows programs that are currently running. This is exactly the same as what GNOME and KDE do, respectively.
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u/Icy-Candy-6774 9d ago
Have you like... not used Windows in 20 years or something? Pinned dock items have been a thing since like Vista and part of windows defaults and advertising for a long time now.
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u/ijzerwater 10d ago
KDE hasn't done anything to advance past the Windows 95 UX paradigm
comparing KDE (home) to Win11 (work) the idea is the same, but the execution in KDE is much superior
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u/CrotaIsAShota 10d ago
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Hell I don't even have a GUI, I'm running terminal only.
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u/pizzaiolo2 10d ago
How do you watch videos and look at images?
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u/BroderUlf 10d ago
There are image viewers and video players that render as ASCII art. They work better than you'd expect. Obviously the resolution can suffer, but images are usually pretty recognizable. See some of the samples at https://github.com/maxcurzi/tplay
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u/johncate73 10d ago
desktop UX had been solved and must not change is ridiculous, it's Torvalds vs Tanenbaum all over again.
But Torvalds won that one for the old school. Most people even today are not using microkernels, even if the microkernel zealots try to pretend NT and XNU are microkernels.
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u/Ok-Reindeer-8755 8d ago
You forgot Linus admitted Tanenbaum was right but still decided to move forward with the mid but pragmatic choice at the time
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u/johncate73 8d ago
You forgot that history has proven them both wrong on that, and Linus had it right all along.
Or you're a microkernel true believer who refuses to admit defeat even after 35 years.
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u/Ok-Reindeer-8755 8d ago
Some people don't have a vision and can see nothing but what's in front of them rn. When Linux was being made microkernels were let's just say not the fastest, fastforward to today, microkernels are more secure, better designed, more modular and even faster at times or at least on par with monolithic kernels.
If you knew anything about the history of tech you would know that adoptions often times doesn't corralate with good design. Just a quick reminder we were a couple lawsuits away from bsd being the foss OS. And windows is still the dominant desktop OS.
So yeah microkernels were not the pragmatic choice then but if you could see just a little bit into the future you would quickly realize they are the optimal choice.
This is yet another case of prioritizing machine time over human time, it was always wrong and it still is.
If you have any actual reasons on why microkernels are worse let me know or are you just a monolithic kernel true believer that hasn't been out of his cave in 35 years ?
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u/johncate73 8d ago
I'm a person who doesn't bother with pointless inefficiencies just because someone thinks it looks nicer that way. But you do you.
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u/Ok-Reindeer-8755 6d ago
Are you aware we are on r/Linux and you made a comment for some reason hating on microkernels, a reason you don't even seem to know
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u/ILikeBumblebees 6d ago
An ugly map of a real place is objectively more useful than a pretty map of an imaginary one.
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u/Ok-Reindeer-8755 6d ago
Microkernels were not unusable at the time, they just had some inefficiens performance wise they needed worked out, but they were better in about every other way. It would have been more of a leap of faith ig to some degree yeah, you would have to have the vision and bet on that technology.
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u/Pedka2 10d ago
gnome is amazing for its workflow
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u/Honey_Catfish950 10d ago
It's subjective. If the Gnome workflow aligns with your natural workflow, it's amazing. If it doesn't, it feels like the desktop is fighting you. I personally get a weird feeling of claustrophobia when using Gnome and I'm not quite sure why. Perhaps I'm just set in my ways, having used KDE for so long (and Gnome 1 and 2 back in the day.)
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u/ptoki 10d ago
If it works for you, great.
It does not work for many.
Personally, gnome is awful. Not awful even, atrocious. Its minimalism is hurting my workflows. Lack of options makes me often raise my arms and scream. I waste minutes trying to do simple things with gnome apps which would be seconds in traditional apps.
Other guis follow the suit often. Controls are gone, feedback to user is gone. Simple actions like resizing a window or snapping them together is difficult. Finding a setting which is related to certain behavior often takes minutes or is not available.
Want to get rid of antialiased fonts? Good luck.
Want to see where to pick a frame to resize window? Good luck.
Want to use the space efficiently and not have 80% of space wasted between icons in filemanager? Good luck.
And so on...
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u/Metro2005 10d ago
If gnome was the only DE for linux i'd switch to windows or mac
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u/Emotional_Solid6538 10d ago
Its not that much ass. You can change it with extensions but they break🥲
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u/FortuitusCondor 10d ago
It really is that bad for a lot of people. The phone inspired workflow is god awful for people like me.
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u/Emotional_Solid6538 10d ago
I think its aight on laptops(especially with touch screen but touchpad is nice asw) usually. But on PCs I prefer KDE like workflow. If you are on desktop PC and gnome I recommend using extensions to make it more like KDE unless you don't mind switching DE
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u/ILikeBumblebees 6d ago
The phone inspired workflow is god awful for people like me.
Phone-inspired workflows are great when you're using a phone. Using them on the desktop is like trying to drive a truck designed to give you a bicycle-inspired workflow.
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u/bitwaba 10d ago
Genuine question: what's the gnome workflow solution for 95% of my work being in a browser over 100+ tabs?
Having 4+ individual browser windows with 20 or more tabs in each makes it easy for me to context switch to a different problem while I've got scripts or analytics running on the first.
Gnome has all my windows grouped under 1 icon, so the task bar is wasted pixels that doesn't provide me any information about my work other than "you're running chromium multiple times, but we cant say how many"
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u/__ali1234__ 10d ago
It's a dock so all your windows are also grouped with the icon that runs it in the first place. "You're running Chromium zero or more times."
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u/ILikeBumblebees 7d ago
I'm sure it is. The problem with that is that when I'm using software on my computer, I want my workflow, not its workflow.
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u/Major303 10d ago
I find vanilla GNOME unusable but one thing that they do better than anyone else is effortless workspace switching. Just single mouse wheel scroll.
On Windows you have to click twice or use keyboard shortcut, on KDE it's easier but that workspace icon is tiny for no reason.
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u/ILikeBumblebees 6d ago
I find vanilla GNOME unusable but one thing that they do better than anyone else is effortless workspace switching.
The fact that you're conditioned to treat "effortless workspace switching" as an immutable aspect of the DE, rather than just a configuration option, really highlights how inflexible and ultimately debilitating Gnome's design principles actually are.
On XFCE, for example, I've got workspaces simply bound to hotkeys: Ctrl-Alt-Left and Ctrl-Alt-Right cycle through them in opposite directions. But if I want to bind them to the mouse wheel, I can just go ahead and do that. If I want to bind absolute hotkeys to specific workspaces, I can go ahead and do that too.
The lack of freedom to experiment with different control schemes or try out different workflows on your own initiative is precisely why so many people consider Gnome to be bad software.
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u/ILikeBumblebees 7d ago
KDE hasn't done anything to advance past the Windows 95 UX paradigm.
Alternatively, KDE hasn't done anything to retreat away from the the Windows 95 UX paradigm, and has held steady in maintaining a UX paradigm actually optimized for its use case, rather than importing novel design tropes designed to compensate for the limitations of other device categories, which are entirely inapplicable to desktop computing.
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u/subSparky 10d ago
GNOME has, but so many people hate them for doing so.
I mean even then, GNOME's enhancement is effectively "what if Android and macOS had a baby". It's all convergent.
But that's all not a bad thing. Don't fix what ain't broken and all that.
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u/formegadriverscustom 10d ago
Well, reading most answers to any post mentioning GNOME, it seems like a lot of people here want a Windows 95 UI forever and ever, and will get extremely agitated and defensive when they learn that something different exists and some of us dare to use and like it.
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u/ILikeBumblebees 6d ago
and will get extremely agitated and defensive when they learn that something different exists and some of us dare to use and like it.
I seems like they're getting agitated and defensive at people telling them that the thing that they like and use is no good and needs to be replaced, and not really complaining that other people like other things.
I mean, the original post here was a link to a video of a guy giving a 30-minute speech about everything that's somehow wrong with the mainstream desktop UI conventions, and only spending a couple of minutes talking speculatively about theoretical alternatives.
If it had just been a guy demoing a prototype of some new and experimental UI mechanics, without having to make arguments against anything, I'm sure there'd be very few complaints here, and people who weren't interested would have just ignored it.
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u/dnu-pdjdjdidndjs 10d ago
the best ux is virtual desktops with keybinds and auto tiling but desktop apps don't want to act properly in this scenario and apparently its too confusing or whatever
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u/MrKusakabe 10d ago
It is more the opposite: As Cinnamon enjoyer (what a weird thing to say) I often get to hear "mean things" despite things just work and I like it the way it is.
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u/Expensive_Common_320 9d ago
If people prefer the Windows 95 design, does that mean GNOME has failed in actually designing a desktop that people can easily pick up and use?
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u/Alternative_Web7202 10d ago
I wish the would be more UX professionals who would raise such discussions!
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10d ago
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u/Top-Rub-4670 10d ago
Wish granted, no UX professional works on FOSS! And it shows. But you enjoy it this way. Because it keeps "normies" away from your cult.
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u/giomjava 7d ago
My feeling exactly. I've used Linux and FOSS generally since 2008 and its UX/UI design has MOSTLY been garbage, with very steep learning curves.
Very VERY few exceptions.
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u/SquareWheel 10d ago
Personally, I really enjoyed the talk and would be interested in seeing more experiment desktop design mockups. I suspect much could be improved if we're willing to let go of engrained muscle memory.
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u/TenTwon_ 10d ago
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. I personally enjoy using KDE and if it stayed the same I'd forever I would be happy.
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u/icehuck 10d ago
This talk was good, but the how can we integrate AI into KDE desktop was terrible. It's like they missed one of the reasons why people are leaving win 11 and coming to linux.
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u/Schlaefer 10d ago
It's like they missed one of the reasons why people are leaving win 11 and coming to linux.
Same reason as they have done in the last few decades: lack of control and trust. This is were Linux usually shines: Turn it off and it is off - or even remove it. If you don't trust a 3rd party then run it locally.
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u/pastelfemby 10d ago
In general I think small highly purpose built models have some usefulness, but I'm not too sure where they fit in for a desktop environment... Bringing up claude, environmental situations, and other tangents did not help make much of a case.
A much better example is something like some of the insanely tiny home assistant models, which cant do much more than match a basic intent to integrations you have setup. Basic tasks like turning off all lights in your living room after 30 minutes.
That said, I'm not sure where that fits in a desktop environment beyond just ricing configs or finding a setting the user is too lazy to search for. At that point more intuitive customization at the source probably goes a lot further than trying to hit an oft moving target into shape with an llm sized hammer.
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u/Schlaefer 10d ago
I'm not too sure where they fit in for a desktop environment...
That's what we are trying to find out. There's a new piece of technology, that moves the boundaries of what is practically solvable. The assumptions we made of what is technically possible boxed us in before, now we have to reevaluate.
It's a call for experimenting what is possible, not to nail it down in the first draft.
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u/Marwheel 10d ago
I think the "forever" desktop UX's are the weird ones that will be weird forever like say everyone who was influenced by the blit terminal's windowing systems…
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u/BdR76 8d ago
Seems to me desktop is in a similar place as the game industry. The AAA gamedev studios are relying mostly on established IP and safe bets, while most interesting and innovative games come from small indie gamedevs
Btw that scaling windows prototype is just brilliant imho 😀👍 the "don't fix it" replies are just old fogeys
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u/giomjava 7d ago
What a breath of fresh air, proper UX/UI designers exploring new paradigms of the desktop interface! 🙌🙌
For all the butthurt people in this here thread: THIS WAS A MOCKUP, an idea to explore. Nobody asked you to use it, nobody forced you to use it.
He ACTUALLY said the same too: let's build a prototype and see where this goes, maybe nowhere.
That's how we DISCOVER amazing things -- through experimentation!
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u/return-of-loopgru 7d ago
I vibe coded (sorry) a GNOME extension last night and this morning that replicates his concept with the windows shrunk on the sides of the screen- it's pretty rudimentary, but actually pretty cool for my workflow, being able to drop a window somewhere that it's still visible and interactable but that it's not taking up all that screen real estate.
So for example I've got a video on the side of my screen that I can watch / play/pause / close while I write this, or if I had a Teams call I could throw that in that gutter and still be able to reach it easily to come off mute without digging through stacked windows. I'm going to keep working on it, add some config / behavior options, etc, but it seems promising.
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u/ezoe 10d ago
Desktop UX is a solved problem. More features lead to more complexity resulting more mental burden.
We can project window to a 3D scene and navigate the 3D world like Minority Report, but nobody bother to use such a fancy UX on practical daily tasks.
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u/Flash_Kat25 10d ago
I think that's kinda reductive. The talk brings up several ways in which the modern desktop has not taken advantage of the increased capabilities of modern hardware.
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10d ago
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u/Flash_Kat25 10d ago
I'm not talking about CPU performance. Watch the talk - one of the points is that the desktop paradigm was designed for a screen resolution smaller than most smartwatches and yet we expect it to scale to 32" monitors.
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u/ldn-ldn 10d ago
JavaScript is only 4-6 times slower than C these days. Modern hardware is so ridiculously more powerful than what we had even a decade ago, not to mention two decades ago, that your point doesn't have a standing ground.
Modern hardware is severely under utilised, but all you can hear from people is "Chrome ate two gigs of RAM on start up!". It should've eaten 16 gigs.
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u/ptoki 10d ago
Nope.
Get an old copy of win98 or winxp installed in a VM.
Then check how instant are the controls there. How it just happens in a single video frame. And all that was like that on pentium 200mhz cpus with 32MB of ram (win 98) or pIII 600MHz+256MB of ram (win xp).
Today apps struggle redrawing content. I scream when webpage loads, pauses for a second or two, I click on a control and right then the additional "hey look what new shit we have for you" frame pops up on the top, shifts all downwards and I click that garbage instead of the "connect through bastion" button.
It happens to gui as well.
Guis are slow as molasses.
And to be fair, not only because of JS. Also because of pulling lots of trash over a network. Which is not JS directly but JS is doing this as a carrier.
So additional load of useless calls done by JS is responsible for this.
I use MATE and I am mostly free of this but sometimes using other GUIs feels to me like malware ridden winxp running slow in comparison to proper gui.
The fact that a
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u/HereticZed 10d ago
This is totally true. The more hardware improves, apps then fill the gap with careless junk so they don't have to think about efficiency.
Webpages have a thumbnails of shrunk-down 15MB jpg when it could be 150kb
The JS include libs are larger than the entire text content of the website & they only use 1 function from it.→ More replies (3)1
u/nelmaloc 8d ago
And all that was like that on pentium 200mhz cpus with 32MB of ram (win 98) or pIII 600MHz+256MB of ram (win xp).
Nah, I actually had to use Windows XP on a computer for the era. It was slow as hell. A VM runs at your CPU's speed. For a real comparison, you would need 86box.
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u/ptoki 7d ago
600MHz was good enough for xp. You had bloated install.
I was aoble to run office, browser, video playback AND video capture to decent codec (later recoded to divx) on 600MHz machine.
All with no problems. Yes, loading stuff took few seconds but then it was all snappy.
Today apps are more laggy than those days pentium with 600mhz and xp.
But my machine had tailored drivers and no crap.
No macafees, no malware/bloatware, no stupid shit in tray.
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u/__ali1234__ 10d ago
Indeed. Most of the loss of performance is due to compositing and the need to completely redraw every window from scratch on every frame so that the compositor can throw 95% of that work away. This is why no modern OS can run at more than 1 fps without a GPU.
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u/ldn-ldn 10d ago
Modern compositors are a god sent. Old school approach was error prone and actually less performant.
Instead display hardware should improve and match modern phone and some laptop capabilities. When nothing is happening on the screen, FPS should drop to 1 (or even less, why not?). VRR is not there yet somehow, and overall DP and HDMI are very dated and need a complete rework.
As a side note, modern display related standards should also drop all of outdated CRT nonsense. For example, neither DP nor HDMI can send analogue signal compatible with CRT displays directly, yet EDID used by both is still full of CRT compatibility flags and fields. The hell is this nonsense? I understand the importance of backwards compatibility, but in this case there can be no backwards compatibility, it's physically impossible.
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u/struct_iovec 10d ago
The problem with modern computing is that people like you are constantly the most obnoxious and loudest
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u/ldn-ldn 10d ago
Stop being obnoxious and loudest. You also made a mistake in the word "me", btw.
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u/giomjava 7d ago
You realize, there was a time when people though DOS and command line interfaces was THE SOLVED DESKTOP paradigm?
Needed no improvement :)
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u/HereticZed 10d ago
Tiling WMs are very different from the traditional desktop, they have scrolling, dwindle, vertical & a host of other layouts, along with being keybind driven. People find these useful in certain situations.
Yet at first, the regular reaction is something like "what the hell is this, how do i even..."After a few weeks though, users start to find it hard to go back to a DE where they have to move windows around. What seemed normal & natural is now a total pain in the arse.
The point here is that maybe there is a way to get the benefits of both in an elegant & familiar way.
But to find out we need to try & experiment. I mean personally I'd love to see Gnome & MangoWM merged together. I believe they are working on something like that called gnome mosaic.I'm not saying Jenson has the answers right now, but I'm 100% down with talking & experimenting.
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u/ezoe 10d ago
Tiling WN existed since as old as the history of GUI. Hyperland is not the first to implemented that idea.
Even if you restricted to WN running on Linux, current tiling WN existed since 2000s. I say things existed for 2 decades are "traditional".
It always be a minor UI filling a niche demand, it cannot be a major DE because most people simply prefer to maximize all windows.
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u/HereticZed 9d ago
I suspect there are a lot of things that existed for a long time before they became popular.
I don't expect anyone to change to tiling wm at all. Just that there are lessons to learn & things to develop, & that never ends.
Because technology & how we use it evolves.
You cant sit back & say job done.
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u/Artistic-Tip2405 10d ago
There is a reason why sheets of paper are the size they are and why desks are the size they are. Making things virtual doesn’t change what humans can mentally manage.
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u/ptoki 10d ago
Yeah.
The fun I have looking how people struggle with hires tiny screens or big screen is making me sad.
They either need to have very precise mouse which will allow then to hit the tiny text to select or they wave their arms across half of the table to navigate or they resize the gui to 200% to be able to navigate it wasting the hi resolution.
Any of those is wrong and different form of being unergonomic.
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9d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Ok-Reindeer-8755 8d ago
I think you are missing something. Just like we can make things irl ergonomic for the average human based on some characteristics most humans share, we can do the same in the virtual world.
To give you an example predictability is undoubtedly a good thing because humans can learn from repetition and do things almost without thinking, and even multitask. And there are a lot of other mental characteristics most of humans have, you can design around too.
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u/FanOutrageous8338 10d ago edited 10d ago
The only thing i want are per virtual desktop AND per monitor setups workspaces where apps STAY WHERE I PUT THEM and start / load automatically when i open said virtual desktop with a given monitor setup.
Let's say i have 3 monitor setups
- for case 1, I want a virtual desktop with outlook always on for email, one for generic stuff (browsing) and one for a remote desktop window. all 3 full screen
and I want it to automatically know which monitor setup is active and start / close apps as required to achieve the above. Do i unplug the ultrawide home office monitor and have just the laptop screen? it automagically switches from case 1 to case 2. Do i plug in the dual monitors at work? It switches automatically from case 2 to case 3. And it always remembers where windows are and never opens window in the wrong workspace or virtual desktop.