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

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.

For content consumption sure.

For content creation though, desktop still rules.

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 people, and then renting this hardware back to us in the form of cloud services.

It’s disturbing and I wish we could stop this.

>productivity is done on a single window browser anyway

When I need to get productive, sometimes I disable the browser to stop myself from wasting time on the web.

And you likely open the browser that happens to be called VS Code, Figma etc

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 that I heavily disagree with one of the points of the presenter. We should not use the next gen hardware to develop for the future Desktop. This is the most nonsensical thing I heard all day. We need to focus on the basics.

Sounds like a dead market. Nobody needs to create content any more now that we have AI.

The point though is that my vscode window does not have an address bar I can use to visit Youtube or Pornhub at any time.

I guess the larger point is that you need a desktop to run vscode or Figma, so the desktop is not dead.

I agree with this. I remember when Gnome 3 came out, there were a lot of legitimate complaints that were handwaved away by the developers as "doesn't work well on a mobile interface", despite Gnome having approximately zero install cases onto anything mobile. AFAICT that probably hasn't changed, all these years later.

Desktop is all about collaboration and interaction with other apps. The ideal of every contemporary SaaS is that you can never download your "files" so you stay locked in.

> Gnome

I can't imagine what I'd be doing without MATE (GNOME 2 fork ported to GTK+ 3).

Recently I've stumbled upon:

> I suspect that distro maintainers may feel we've lost too many team members so are going with an older known quantity. [1]

This sounds disturbing.

[1] https://github.com/mate-desktop/caja/issues/1863#issuecommen...

Exactly. Interoperability is not cool anymore. You need to lock users in

KDE? It has great performance, it's highly configurable, and it's been improving. Many people don't seem to like GNOME 3, but it has also been getting better, in my view. I agree Windows and macOS have been getting worse.

I don’t know. I just started distributing a gtk app and I’ve already gotten two issue reports from people using it on mobile experiencing usability problems. Not something I thought I’d have to worry about when I started but I guess they are out there.

FWIW, this just isn't true for KDE. We hit a rough patch with the KDE 4.x series - 17 years ago - that has been difficult to live down, but have done much in the way of making amends since, including learning from and avoiding the mistakes we made back then.

For example, we intentionally optimized Plasma 5 for low-powered devices (we used to have stacks of the Pinebook at dev sprints, essentially a RaspPi-class board in a laptop shell), shedding more than half the menory and compute requirements in just that generational advance.

We also have a good half-decade of QA focus behind us, including community-elected goals like a consistency campaign, much like what you asked for.

I'm confident Plasma 5 and 6 have iteratively gotten better on all four points.

It's certainly not perfect yet, and we have many areas to still improve about the product, some of them greatly. But we're certainly not enshittifying, and the momentum remains very high. Nearly all modern, popular new distros default to KDE (e.g. Bazzite, CachyOS, Asahi, Valve SteamOS) and our donation totals from low-paying individual donors - a decent proxy for user satisfaction - have multiplied. I've been around the commnunity for about 20 to 25 years and it's never been a more vibrant project than today.

Re the fantastic talk, thanks for the little KDE shout-out in the first two minutes!

No, thanks. I'm a gamer but I don't need a console like UX as the only option.

MS invests in actively making desktop experience.

But outside of that I doubt there will be many users actually doing stuff (as opposed to just ingesting content) that will abandon desktop, and other ones like Mac UI isn't getting worse

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 file managers, but dolphin gives you a panel just for that. And then tabs, splits, thumbnails, and graph views.

> MS invests in actively making desktop experience.

... shitty.

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.

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.