Stuff like compiz was first on Linux. Woefully underused - even on Linux!

Enlightenment was amazing in the old days.

> Why would I want to change anything?

You don't need to change anything, but others do! Suppose the world decided tiling WMs were the way to go, and you could no longer run Gnome the way you currently do. Would you be happy?

The ideal is to have more features/capabilities, while not breaking existing users like you and me.

So I don’t know about your particular set up. But maybe a usability researcher will come up with a way of working that’s more productive or efficient than what you’re doing now.

But I will hand it to Gnome: they're the only wayland protocol desktop that supports accessibilty. That's huge. So even if I hate how it behaves right now while mostly sighted Gnome DE may be the only option for me in the future. And I guess I won't have to look at it when my retinas finish falling off.

As am I.

One thing I would like to change is that on Linux I can paste text by selecting it and clicking the middle mouse button to paste. This is better than using ^C ^V because I don't have to get off the mousing and onto the keyboard. But unfortunately on some webshites the MMB doesn't work.

> Why bother to learn a new UI, when all that does is get you back to square 1, and it might not even stick around

Exactly. That's why I gave up and stay on i3 and the common tools I use. I've been for a few month under hyprland and yeah no I'll go back to X11+i3 the pain it provides is just not worth it even if the common user would think they're pretty similar.

I'm already upset that I have to use Windows at work because I've not used it in years and I have to relearn everything again (like every time you want to change some settings it appears that Microsoft has moved them?) that I don't have the free time to spend to do the same on Linux. I just want my computer to work and to work the same unless I specifically decide to change it, not because some update thought it would be cool to move things around

That sentiment is probably what it means to growing older though

In fact, I think decoupling things from Gnome has been one of the best outcomes of Wayland.

The year of Linux will start the day we have a capable wayland desktop environment that is not foreign to Mac and Windows users without chasing stupid churn. /rant

This is the number one thing that bugs me about all the mobile OS platforms. The most important thing to me is my data not the programs that I use to operate on them.

Anyone can have a copy of the programs I use, but only I have my data.

Leaving the organisation of something so important to some XYZ app doing who knows what is just madness to me.

The Xerox Star, the Canon Cat and Apple Lisa’s OSes were largely document oriented, and placed no emphasis on the application at all. The Operating System owned the creation and editing aspects of the document. Developers could only add "tools" that slotted into the existing interfaces the OS provided. You’d never launch an App on any of those OSes, you’d "tear off" a new doc from the stationary pad on a Lisa (that sounds ridiculous as I type it).

That paradigm really goes against the idea of "Software as a separate product", which is an older idea, starting in the 1960s at IBM (they unbundled HW and SW, partly under anti-trust pressure). The document-centric GUIs/Shells don’t really allow for a separate software market.

The 1984 Mac was kind of a middle ground, in my mind. It was a platform for discrete Applications (sold separately) but it also had the Finder which let you organise, open and delete documents separately from the Application that edited them.

Apple and later MS tried to bring the document-first concept back with OpenDoc and OLE respectively. OpenDoc never went anywhere then Jobs killed it, and OLE turned out much smaller in ambition and scope (and I think was never very popular with devs).

I think ultimately the intuition and perceived benefit behind document centric GUIs is pretty clear: the OS knows what kinds of artefacts it can handle, and presents a consistent and controlled interface to the user. File interoperability problems are minimised. Devs are allowed to extend functionality to an extent, but they can never take over the system or invent a new kind of interaction.

The App-first paradigm OTOH places more power in the Application developers hands, gives them the means to innovate, and allows for a larger, more diverse, more self-important software market to exist (see iOS).

Mixing the two, as the Mac does, comes with some confusion and complication for the end user, but I think is ultimately the right balance for everyone.

This statement reminds me of Sugar, the desktop originally developed by One Laptop Per Child. Sugar is basically the exact inverse of where mobile is going, so it's kinda interesting to look back on.

Sugar tries to blur the line between files and applications. Instead, you deal in "activities" which are a file, bundled with certain context (ex: what program opens it), all in a pretty flat hierarchy.

The way Sugar does things, w there isn't a "File -> Open" in sight. All file opening happens from that Activities menu.

To be clear: Do I think we should just take what Sugar does and put it in GNOME? Hell no! Sugar is very simplistic by design, it's not suitable for adult productivity. But, it's an immediately intuitive concept. Imagine if the app drawer was a chronological list not of every app, but of every thing you've worked on in all apps.

I think that's an idea worth exploring, maybe for tiling WMs specifically where maintenance of the desktop itself (arranging it, organizing it, etc) is such a dominant part of the experience.

Is this really a meaningful distinction or just your preference? I find myself reaching for a file manager on desktop a lot less than 30 years ago, because when a file structure is necessary it's nearly always handled by a specialized app, and I don't need that many advanced file management features anymore (example: RAW + sidecars are handled by my RAW app itself, not my file manager, because both are useless without each other). Software development is an obvious exception and power user configuration is an unnecessary exception.

>This is changing a lot how you are organizing the way you work. On desktop, it is easy to put related files of different types in the same folder, for example you organize your birthday, you can have the list of the invited people in a excel file with their number, a subfolder with the songs you want to play, some pictures of the venue, a text files with notes and etc. It is not natural at all to organize things like that on mobile.

Then it seems you're talking about a more fundamental distinction which is "flat collections filterable/searchable by metadata" vs "hierarchical trees with a mnemonic structure" to organize entities. Not about files vs non-files. But again I use both on desktop and mobile without problems (simple example: Obsidian has a tree, media catalogues are typically either flat collections or hybrid).

UI in general, let alone UX, is a much wider concept than that single difference.

I'm still mad at GNOME developers for ruining such a good desktop environment.

Luckily, Linux Mint managed to create a good environment that is as pleasant as using GNOME 2.

Having the desktop not also be a file dump by default and instead a space for mostly useless widgets was one of the few good things KDE 4 did.

Now I never see my desktop. A handful of apps, primarily Chrome, are permanently open in front of it. The computer is always on, if I reboot then the previous state more or less restores automatically.

So the desktop itself is not really prime real estate any more. It's more of an abstract idea, the layer underneath all the useful bits. The windows have taken over.

On macOS the desktop path is where screenshots go... so mostly I just have a litter of 100s of screenshots there.

Communicating at work seems to involve taking lots of screenshots.

Usually these are files I don't really care to keep around, I just need it in the moment so I can add it to a message in Slack, Teams, Jira, Github etc.

So it feels like this primitive could maybe be built into the OS in a more developed way than just screen area -> file, so that you could access it directly from apps (in a consistent way - as an OS feature) and avoid generating junk files.

My current desktop works like that. It's not quite what you're describing, but it's a couple of minor iterations away to allow multiple different snapshots.

Desktop UX I think is a much more deeply personal and subjective thing than many care to admit. A setup that’s one user’s nirvana can be another’s anathema (case in point: the tiling setups beloved by many in the tech sphere drive me crazy).

While some underlying principles track between different solutions, I don’t think it’s possible to build a desktop that works well for everybody. We all have different mental models, ways of thinking, ways of working, and formative experiences with technology and that all goes into what we find most ergonomic and comfortable. It’s very similar to how radically people’s physical workspaces can differ from each other.

So the best thing to do I think is to ensure that a wide variety of meaningfully different desktops are available so as many users can find one that’s a reasonably close match to their style. Trying to pose a single desktop as “most correct” and shoehorning all users into it is a recipe for failure. Maybe the futuristic concept desktop is the right choice for someone even if most would prefer something more traditional.

>These UI "innovations" are great for movie props but do they actually help in reality? Not that I see.

Scott Jenson specifically mentioned in this talk that he doesn't view open source devs as programmers who couldn't care less about needs of non-power users, but this is exactly that sort of a tone deaf response, and a really narrow perspective.

Most actually novel things in Linux desktops since the ~late 2000s target the extreme power users. They have near-zero discoverability, terrible defaults, building substantial skills and constant practice and maintenance are required to use it for rather routine operations, etc. I mean I also used to configure my WM by programming it in Lua (because it expected the users to know it and I do), I also use emacs for quarter a century, I use Nix to set up my entire desktop, but I'm not saying everything else is useless and carries "anti-me agenda".

Your animation example is really telling, most users are like "where did my window go??" without it, I'm talking from the first-hand experience of watching young people trying to use a computer. The CPU argument is simply inane and 100% irrelevant for the modern hardware, I'd understand if it was distracting for you (and me too), but wasting CPU is a silly hill to die on. Power user interfaces that make simple things hard is the primary reason most young people outside of a really narrow group are not tech-savvy and look at desktops as obsolete ancient tech.

There are arguments that it's impossible to target both power users and any others, but these are all simply wrong. Both target groups are totally compatible, you can look at Microsoft's ribbon or superbar as an example of such an interface. In the worst case you introduce a simple binary setting if you don't want the cues, don't tell me it offends you somehow please.

(That said, it's funny to hear SJ mentioning his work on Finder, because that's probably the worst non-power-user file manager in existence.)

Your objection reminds me of people feeling a difference between two monitors, and one monitor twice the size.