Improving The Linux Desktop? Why, It’s Elementary
linux-mag.com
linux-mag.com
Now it's: "we should look more like OS X!"
Where's the innovation? Why is an exciting new desktop just another imitation?
> /opt? /bin? /sys? dll files? What is all that?
Most users have no reason to even wonder, since they are already tucked away from them. Stuff like this just shows that the project is out of touch right from the start. Linux desktop projects constantly misjudge their audience. This one is no exception.
I should say though, I think people put far, far too much weight on "innovation" and "originality" (not mentioned here but along the same lines).
That said, it was more important for me that it was a tiling window manager, not that it was XMonad (it's simply the one I use). Dwm would probably work just as well.
An application like MS Office or Photoshop or OS X are huge and monolithic and thus don't lend themselves to dispersed development.
What would be good is finding innovative interfaces that allow presentation and data to be separate and thus developed separately - #1 huge example, the web. Making the desktop like the web makes huge sense.
The thing about people using applications like Photoshop and Word is that they have established workflows that its users have come to expect. From a design perspective, they're pidgeonholed because any significant UI change means that they would have to retrain the vast majority of its users. So Adobe and MS make minor tweaks to its UI instead. Admittedly, MS made a big change with the ribbons ui element, but you get the picture.
Open source stuff has the advantage (I guess you could call it that) of having a much larger volume of new users and a much smaller volume of old users, so there's more room to experiment with different UIs to solve the problem of getting people to interact meaningfully with the programs. I'd say for the vast majority of the projects, the UI is an afterthought so it ends up being poorly designed. Even so, the opportunity is there.
The desktop is a little different though, there's already a load of user expectations that you have to live up to. The space for proposing solutions is a lot smaller. Riding on the coat tails of OSX may not be a bad idea so long as the developers understand the reasons why Mac made the design decisions that they did and adjust accordingly.
At least that's how I feel. Trying to innovate isn't a bad thing, it has to lead to failure first before you get it right.
Where's the innovation? Why is an exciting
new desktop just another imitation?
I'd argue, that there is little left to innovate within desktop, there is only room for relatively small improvements — and that's natural course of thing in maturing media.
Take paper books: there was almost no innovation for hundreds of years: I say that's because their current form is optimal within constrains imposed by media.
With computers we have less mature media and different set of constrains, but eventually it will settle down and the only innovation will be possible outside the desktop, like some next big thing that will replace it.
But the whole design space is really, really small. You're mostly making a distinction by a subtly different look and some procedural differences. This is true for every desktop since the 80s, whether it's System 6, OS X, RISC OS, KDE, GNOME or WPS.
That is what the audience wants. The amount of developers isn't that influential anymore, and even they are most likely to use Windows 95/Nextstep style interfaces since they started out using computers. The old Unix greybeards (and their spiritual successors) populate a very small island with weird palm tress.
There still are about as many, if not more people who use their DE as a glorified terminal multiplexer (or Emacs life support). But for them, "Linux on the Desktop" never was an issue in the first place.
I seriously doubt that anything really new will come on the desktop. Everything that tried failed (mostly integrated systems like Oberon, Smalltalk, Plan 9) for the "common user", or got integrated in the normal desktop (web apps, terminal emulators). Everything new seems to happen on different devices (mostly mobile), and even there I don't see a different frontier, it's mostly a mash-up of traditional desktop GUIs and web apps, adjusted for the limitations on the devices.
Not every potential user is an idiot. There are plenty of people who would learn, if the learning process felt more like lifting weights and less like having drain cleaner poured on your face.
Not every potential user is an idiot.
I don't understand. Could you give concrete examples of "hacking a computer" that could be fun and useful for a great variety of smart people?
Crisscrossing traffic patterns with a database of customers so you can efficiently landscape all your clients and make more money instead of waiting around being stuck in traffic.
Build and program swarm bots that clean the floors of your client faster so you can jump to the next client.
Write A/B testing programs for your restaurant chains so you can increase earning from your customers by incrementally trying out ways to get more customers, sell more foods, etc.
Programming, however, only tended to be used by programmers.
Sounds plenty analogous to the many parts of the compiler or interpreter toolchains in place in modern OSes.
I suspect Usability designers would probably only care about easy to learn interface over the hard to remember but extremely efficient keyboard commands.
Emacs is a perfect example of this. Extremely efficient and very good at what it do, but it requires a lot of learning for the user. However, the benefit will paid off for the learning curve thousand of times over.
"A better UI philosophy" wouldn't even have to be anything new. It's just the classic modular Unix way--the thing that makes shell scripts so easy and satisfying. It should have been extended to GUI. I would guess that someone tried, but it didn't catch on. The idea is too obvious.
I don't think anyone interested in "hackability" feels like it's analogous to having "drain cleaner poured on your face". There may be ways to make cool scripting more accessible, but there's nothing particularly contrived about it IMO.
The bottom line is that people don't care that much about computers. If Windows lets them do everything they want to do, then there's no problem. And all most people want to do is use Facebook, Excel, the proprietary program needed for their profession, and email. All of these work fine on Windows and everyone knows how to get to them from the Windows interface. They know the ins and outs of Excel and for most Excel jockeys, OO Calc isn't going to cut it, because they have to relearn some shortcuts, button locations, etc. to use Calc, but they already know how to use Excel and can hit the ground running, so they prefer Excel. Same with almost all other software.
So the real reason the Linux desktop isn't going anywhere is because nobody cares. If you want Linux desktops to proliferate, you have to give people a reason to care; something new and specific that a normal person would think is cool and buy-worthy. For most people, technical arguments like "The TCP/IP stack is great!", "iptables is great!", or whatever, they don't care about that.