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

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179 points joelkesler | 6 comments | 13 Dec 25 18:39 UTC | HN request time: 1.374s | source | bottom
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calmbonsai ◴[13 Dec 25 21:03 UTC] No.46258024[source]▶
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, personalization, or regulatory compliance.

Desktop Computers are no exception.

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1. Hammershaft ◴[13 Dec 25 21:13 UTC] No.46258116[source]▶
All of the other examples you gave are products constrained by physical reality with a small set of countable use-cases. I don't think computer operating systems are simply mature appliance-like products that have been optimized down their current design. I think there is a lot of potential that hasn't been realized because the very few players in the operating system space have been been hill-climbing towards a local maxima set by path dependence 40 years ago.
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2. calmbonsai ◴[13 Dec 25 21:34 UTC] No.46258318[source]▶
To be precise, we're talking about "Desktop Computers" and not the more generic "information appliances".

For example, we're not remotely close to having a standardized "watch form-factor" appliance interface.

Physical reality is always a constraint. In this case, keyboard+display+speaker+mouse+arms-length-proximity+stationary. If you add/remove/alter _any_ of those 6 constraints, then there's plenty of room for innovation, but those constraints _define_ a desktop computer.

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3. pegasus ◴[13 Dec 25 22:42 UTC] No.46258937[source]▶
That's just the thing, desktops computers have always been in an important way the antithesis of a specialized appliance, a materialization of Turing's dream of the Universal Machine. It's only in recent years that this universality has come under threat, in the name of safety.
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4. calmbonsai ◴[14 Dec 25 05:24 UTC] No.46260960{3}[source]▶
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 evolution of hospital patient life-sign monitors and the classic "6 pack" of gauges used in both aviation and automobiles.

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5. pegasus ◴[14 Dec 25 10:43 UTC] No.46262155{4}[source]▶
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.
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6. calmbonsai ◴[15 Dec 25 05:58 UTC] No.46270936{5}[source]▶
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.