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

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 liking. He even mentioned how unpopular making things configurable is in the UI community.

A perfect pain point example was mentioned in the video: Text selection on mobile is trash. But each app seems to have different solutions, even from the same developer. Google Messages doesn't allow any text selection of content below an entire message. Some other apps have opted in to a 'smart' text select which when you select text will guess and randomly group select adjacent words. And lastly, some apps will only ever select a single word when you double tap which seemed to be the standard on mobile for a long time. All of this is inconsistent and often I'll want to do something like look up a word and realize oh I can't select the word at all (G message), or the system 'smartly' selected 4 words instead, or that it did what I want and actually just picked one word. Each application designer decided they wanted to make their own change and made the whole system fragmented and worse overall.

> He even mentioned how unpopular making things configurable is in the UI community.

Inability to imagine someone might have different idea about what's useful is general plague of UI/UX industry. And there seem to be zero care given to usage by user that have to use the app longer than 30 seconds a day. Productivity vs learning time curve is basically flat, and low, with exception being pretty much "the tools made by X for X" like programming IDEs

Back in the 90s, you had a setting for everything! It was glorious. This trend of deliberately not making things configurable is the worst, and we can’t seem to escape it because artists are in charge of the UI rather than human interaction professionals.

App designers need to understand that their opinions on how the app should look and work are just that: opinions. Opinions they should keep to themselves.

Try to maintain the whole matrix or possibilities then you tell me...

Which is why you should think about how these options interact and compose at the start, as opposed to only adding options in an ad-hoc manner (whether you do it willy-nilly or only when your arm is really twisted)