Comment on KDE Akademy: Scott Jenson: Are We Really Going to Use the Same Desktop UX Forever?

foggy@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

• lime@feddit.nu ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  windows 3.11s program manager wasn’t broken either. nor was norton commander for DOS, or motif for workstation unices. you need to innovate to even know if you’re in a local maximum.

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  • foggy@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    “Program Manager wasn’t broken” doesn’t really contradict “don’t fix what isn’t broken.”

    The point isn’t that interfaces should never change. It’s that changes should solve identifiable problems. Program Manager eventually stopped scaling well to how people were actually using computers, and the taskbar/Start menu ux we all use today solved most of those problems. It took iterations, but we’ve got something pretty solid these days as compared to Windows 3.11.

    If you think the current desktop UX has equivalent problems, identify them. “We’ve used this paradigm for a long time” is not itself a reason to replace it.

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    • lime@feddit.nu ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      we have multiple different paradigms today, but due to how big the market is and how big the fraction of people who’re not interested in exploring the space is, the only places the innovation happens is in labs. there aren’t any ux user studies on an os-level anymore.

      except the “desktop” and “buttons on a grid” modes of operation, the biggest one is “scrolling app”, followed waaaaaay down by things like tiling interfaces and whatever the hell gnome is doing. there are multiple interesting ideas down there, like the “infinite whiteboard” of oberon or “zui” of eaglemode, or even the “composable widget toolbox” of arcan. it’s just that they will never seem use outside a few hundred users at most because they are so different. nobody is interested in checking if users prefer them because the users are also the developers and there’s no budget behind them.

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      • foggy@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        It’s not that there is no interest. It is that the current paradigm adequately solves the problems for the vast majority of users. Oberons infinite whiteboard will gain market share when it solves a problem users actually have.

        I repeat, do not fix what is not broken.

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  • Jiffy_Lubricant@piefed.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    True. Until someone makes a Windows Bob, you can’t know that no one needs a Windows Bob.

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  • pimento64@sopuli.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    you need to innovate to even know if you’re in a local maximum

    This can be done inside your brain if you have the processing power.

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    • lime@feddit.nu ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      so, “skill issue”?

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      • pimento64@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        No, “don’t be a dipshit”

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