Comment by intrasight
5 hours ago
The problem, in my opinion, isn't that they "do", but they "can". Once the windowing system gave up control, it disempowered the user. For example, allowing apps to change the window chrome. For me that was basically the end of usability of WIMP. We no longer have a strong separation of concerns. we need that back, and we need the user to be in charge of the behavior of the windowing system. my strong preference, for example, is that I cannot interact with any window that doesn't have focus until I give it focus. At some point in the last 20 years, that standard was broken, and I have been stuck ever since accidentally doing things to windows that don't have focus.
You need that to do drag and drop with one mouse-down and one mouse-up.
Given that, the designer can decide if that’s an exception and everything else requires click-to-focus before being interactive, or to use focus-follows-mouse. People really seem to have individual preferences on this, so there’s no one right answer.
Some window managers let you configure that. Tiling WMs in particular are better for that kind of thing, IMO.
I don’t think the “desktop metaphor” is particularly important or useful. It seems more like a gimmick to help people who’ve never used a computer before have something concrete to cling to. If you take away the desktop, tiling WMs are a natural place to end up. (Not that you can’t have a desktop with icons etc. in a tiling WM, but it loses a lot of its significance and isn’t really needed.)