Comment by account42

> Scott Jenson has been working on user interfaces (UIs) and user experience (UX) for many years at Apple, Google, and other companies.

Sorry but that's the last kind of person I want to have any say about my desktop. If I wanted dumbed down mass market design I'd use a mass market OS. Hopefully KDE resists what this guy suggests.

And of course he proves my concerns right at the end:

> The final idea he discussed was a way of gathering ""privacy-preserving data""

No, fuck off. You have not right to gather any data from my systems.

> when I joined, we weren't evil; we were really trying to do the right thing

Says everyone who worked for big tech ever.

.

Linux software isn't lacking in UX design, it has made different tradeoffs and that's OK and often even a strength:

> The developers wanted to put the ellipsis at the end of the file name, but he thought that would lose too much information, and suggested that the ellipses should be in the middle of the file names.

Both solutions hide the same amount of text and which hides more important text is coincidental. On the other hand hiding the end of the filename is more predictable for the user who can choose to put important information first for longer filenames.

> On most Linux systems, though, if a user is trying to click and drag a file from a window in the background it will cause the window to raise as soon as the user does the "mouse down" action. That complicates trying to click and drag a file from one window to another. That is a fundamental action that means that users can't move data into applications quite as easily on Linux as they can on the Mac.

Raising windows on mouse down lowers latency for that action, which is much more common than the edge case of dragging from a partially covered window to one that would be covered if the original window was raised.

> The point he was really trying to make, though, is that the desktop UX had not really changed in 20 years. There were plenty of new ideas and improvements in the 1980s and 1990s, ""and then it just stabilized, and not much has really changed"".

That's good and expected. When a technology matures then improvements become more and more incremental and less and less things you'd recogize as big change. I don't need or want some mighty designer disrupting my workflow with grand new ideas how things should work.

> Much of the UX for Linux systems was originally copied from Windows and the Mac, ""KDE even says it's for Windows users, that it wants to be similar to Windows for users"".

Much but far from all. He's really underplaying the window management improvements like soft-tiling that e.g. KDE has brought to the table and which were subsequently (badly) copied by Windows and not the other way around.

> Jenson theorized that the reason there are so many desktop environments, window managers, and Wayland compositors for Linux—as well as alternative clipboard managers—is because the desktop isn't quite working right for users.

No, it's because "right" is not a constant across all users.

> He noted that the center of a widescreen monitor is good for working with an application, but it becomes more difficult to work on the sides of the monitor. ""It's good for peripheral vision, but not good for working"".

I don't agree with that premise at all - in fact, having at least two widescreen monitors is the bare minimum for developers around me.

Also all the AI detours are just distracting and worst case betray the real motivation. No, you don't actually HAVE to address AI in every talk dude.

And no, the semantic desktop, just like the semantic web, did not fail for primarily technical reasons but because its a solution in search of a problem.