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Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? [video]

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Re: Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? [video]

#201

Post by johanyc »

ahartmetz wrote: post #164
jhhh wrote: post #72

I understand the desire to want to fix user pain points. There are plenty to choose from. I think the problem is that most of the UI changes don't seem to fix any particular issue I have. They are just different, and when some changes do create even more problems there's never any configuration to disable them. You're trying to create a perfect, coherent system for everyone absent the ability to configure it to our l…

>Text selection on mobile is trash Doesn't have to be - Blackberry BB10 had damn near solved it. I think they had some patents on it, but these should have expired, and I noticed some corresponding changes in Android. But it's still far from being as good as BB10. What BB10 had was a kind of combined cursor and magnifying glass that controlled really well, plus the ability to tap the thing left or right to move one l…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mi-XrtAmRuk

it doesn't look very easy to use in the demo tbh

Re: Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? [video]

#202

Post by scottjenson »

averynicepen wrote: post #110
scottjenson wrote: post #2

I've given dozens of talks, but this one seems to have struck a chord, as it's my most popular video in quite a while. It's got over 14k views in less than a day. I'm excited so many people are interested in desktop UX!

This was a really fantastic talk and kept me riveted for 40 minutes. Where can I find more?

I post nearly everyone on my blog jenson.org

Re: Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? [video]

#203

Post by rustcleaner »

bgbntty2 wrote: post #105

This is a (very) rambling comment since I added things to it as I watched the video. I think the state of the current Desktop UX is great. Maybe it's a local maximum we've reached, but I love it. I mostly use XFCE and there are just a few small things I'd like changed or fixed. Nothing that I even notice frequently. I've used tiling window managers before and they were fine, but it was a bit of a hassle to get used t…

>I mostly use XFCE and there are just a few small things I'd like changed or fixed. Nothing that I even notice frequently.

I know what you mean. XFCE today is reminiscent of what KDE 3.5 (TDE today) was in its era. XFCE seems to be arriving in a place somewhat similar to KDE 3.5 in relative customize-ability and feel. KDE 3.5 gave me wallpaper thumbnails on my desktop switcher, XFCE doesn't. It would be nice to open my 12 or 48 or whatever desktops drawer and see all the desktops' wallpapers collage into their master image, like I used to fifteen years ago!

Re: Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? [video]

#204

Post by rustcleaner »

IMO a good interface should behave like it gives priority to the universe of workflows, that it respects the universality of Universal Machines and doesn't just merely resemble an appliance. Siemens NX, MSOffice/LibreOffice, Adobe CS6 Master Collection, and KDE 3.5 (Konqueror > Dolphin) are all examples off the top of my head of applications which, in varyng amounts, respected this universality principle in UI/UX design. They were fields to put your workflows together on, like ComfyUI is in image generation. Gnome has been the antithesis of this. Any kind of "simplified design" just seems to me like an artist has control and not an engineer-mathematician.

Great UI/UX will foster emergence in habits and workflows, AND AVOID BREAKING MUSCLE MEMORY AT ALMOST ANY COST! Terrible UI/UX will create hard but beautiful chutes to push cattle through and into the money fleecing machine.

Re: Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? [video]

#205

Post by rustcleaner »

linguae wrote: post #50
whatever1 wrote: post #48

Desktop is dead. Gamers will move to consoles and Valve-like platforms. Rest of productivity is done on a single window browser anyway. Llms will accelerate this Coders are the only ones who still should be interested in desktop UX, but even in that segment many just need a terminal window.

Is it dead because people don’t want the desktop, or is it dead because Big Tech won’t invest in the desktop beyond what’s necessary for their business? Whether intentional or not, it seems like the trend is increasingly locked-down devices running locked-down software, and I’m also disturbed by the prospect of Big Tech gobbling up hardware (see the RAM shortage, for example), making it unaffordable for regular peopl…

Digital sovereignty is woefully undertaught. Things like FOSS software, cryptography and its many uses, digital rights management, ownership rights, right to repair, etc. We are turning computers into monkey-friendly appliance devices, when we should be molding tiny humans into digitally sovereign supermonkeys on advanced universal computation devices. How does anyone graduate high school not having heard of the Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange? In my ideal, that would not happen. Students taught properly in digital sovereignty should be extremely difficult to surveil or control digitally with almost any kind of local, network, or service lock. This is a good thing, we want digital barbarian warriors and not digital slaves.

Re: Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? [video]

#206

Post by rustcleaner »

array_key_first wrote: post #190
sprash wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not dead. It's being murdered. Microsoft, Apple, Gnome and KDE are making the experience worse with each update. Productive work becomes a chore. And the last thing we need is more experiments. We need more performance, responsiveness, consistency and less latency. Everything got worse on all 4 points for every desktop environment despite hardware getting faster by several orders of magnitude. This also means th…

I don't know how you can say this about KDE with a straight face. They basically never remove features, and just add on more customization. You can get your desktop to behave exactly like Windows 95, if you want. And the apps are some of the most productive around. Dolphin is the best file manager across every operating system, and it's not even close. Basic things like reading metadata is overlooked in all other fil…

KDE 3.5 -> 4 was its Gnome moment. The fall wasn't as hard, they have come up somewhat from there, but they still don't touch their KDE 3.5.10 Konqueror-primary days. Dolphin was a great example of the rot setting in during those days; Konqueror was the all-in-one browser application and Dolphin was the simplification cancer coming in. THAT particular KDE (which is TDE today) was peak KDE. Yes I am still this buttmad about Dolphin's introduction.

I use XFCE now.

Re: Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? [video]

#207

Post by throwaboat »

gausswho wrote: post #172
throwaboat wrote: post #160

I'd like to point to tabs in browsers as a problem area. Ctrl + T is a problem. I'll set the scene that I think most of us have experienced: you're working on a project. You start down the rabbit hole of research to find a solution to something. Maybe you find it quickly somehow. But this case, you don't. The problem is too big for an easy answer and instead requires synthesis and reflection. Eventually, after openin…

You may like Zen browser. It''s best just to ignore tabs anyway. After reopening a window they'll be inactive until you open them.

I checked Zen out today. Seems pretty neat. I like the spaces idea.

Re: Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? [video]

#208

Post by calmbonsai »

pegasus wrote: post #166
calmbonsai wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't save the driver is "safety". It's happened that a few highly-specialized symbolic manipulation tasks now have enough market value such that they can demand highly specialized UX to optimize task performance. One classic example is the "Bloomberg Box": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomberg_Terminal which has been around since the late '80s. You can also see this from the reverse (analog -> digital) in the…

I meant the universality (openness) of desktop computers comes under threat, as the "walled garden" model seeks to make the jump from mobile to desktop.

Ah yes, I agree. I run macOS as my daily driver, but otherwise barely skim the Apple ecosystem. Apple laptops were just the best hardware to run a Unix-ish (BSD) on.

Now with performant hypervisors, I just run a bunch of Linux VMs locally to minimize splash-zone and do cloud for performance computing.

I'll likely migrate fully to a Framework laptop next year, but I don't have time (atm) to do it. Ah, the good 'ole glory days of native Linux on Thinkpads.

Re: Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? [video]

#209

Post by calmbonsai »

danans wrote: post #87
calmbonsai wrote: post #18

For desktops, basically, yes. And that's OK. Take any other praxis that's reached the 'appliance' stage that you use in your daily life from washing machines, ovens, coffee makers, cars, smartphones, flip-phones, televisions, toilets, vacuums, microwaves, refrigerators, ranges, etc. It takes ~30 years to optimize the UX to make it "appliance-worthy" and then everything afterwards consists of edge-case features, perso…

> Take any other praxis that's reached the 'appliance' stage that you use in your daily life from washing machines, ovens, coffee makers, cars ... I wish the same could be said of car UX these days but clearly that has regressed away from optimal.

Truth.

Re: Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? [video]

#210

Post by ahartmetz »

johanyc wrote: post #201
ahartmetz wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Text selection on mobile is trash Doesn't have to be - Blackberry BB10 had damn near solved it. I think they had some patents on it, but these should have expired, and I noticed some corresponding changes in Android. But it's still far from being as good as BB10. What BB10 had was a kind of combined cursor and magnifying glass that controlled really well, plus the ability to tap the thing left or right to move one l…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mi-XrtAmRuk it doesn't look very easy to use in the demo tbh

It looks like the thing that I remembered appears at 2:06 and later. I also tried to find a video example when I wrote my post and didn't find anything. Seems like very few people get excited about text selection.
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