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Comment by ilmiont | Hacker News Reader

This seems to be very much change for the sake of it.

"The traditional desktop computer is struggling to adapt the simple interfaces of mobile devices while also keeping its focus on productivity."

No, no, it isn't. Desktop is far more productive than mobile ever will be or can be.

"The desktop computer hasn’t changed much in the last 30 years. It’s still built on windows, folders and mouse input. But we have changed. We now use smartphones and tablets most of the time, since they are much easier to use."

No, they're not. The reason why the desktop hasn't changed much in 30 years is because it works.

It may not be the prettiest or the most modern or even the easiest for a new computer user to navigate, but it works damned well for getting work done. That's why windows and mice are still around... they just work. This project... doesn't look like it does that.

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> Desktop is far more productive than mobile ever will be or can be.

Hear, hear! The desktop computer (and the metephor of "desktop") works. People have learned and adapted to be very productive with it.

I do not want a desktop computer with "the simple interfaces of mobile devices". I don't want to remember three-finger gestures on a trackpad, and certainly don't need voice-activated commands (it's faster and more accurate to type).

Like you, I'd also argue against the statement that "we now use smartphones and tablets most of the time", or that "they are much easier to use". This completely depends on what the user is doing with the device.

For certain kinds of communication, application or media consumption, sure mobile devices are easier to use. They're not that great for long-form writing (email, articles, books, programs), or as a personal information management system (file system, database).

All that said, the designs in this project are beautiful, and there are some useful-looking interface ideas. I found this statement at the bottom:

"Neo was designed to inspire and provoke discussions about the future of productive computing."

It has definitely succeeded in this goal.

They really lost me at the whole 3 finger gesture thing. That's a very unnattural thing to do when you are only ever using 1 finger at a time for 90% of the interactions with the touchpad. Furthermore they have like 2 handed 3 finger gestures to do things like zoom in and out.... I feel like pinch to zoom is a lot more effective and natural.

Three finger gestures are actually pretty nice when you get used to them. I even use the four finger gestures that Windows has somewhat frequently (to switch between virtual desktops)

Three finger is the one gesture I actually use on my macbook pro. My thumb sits on the edge of the laptop, my index is on the glass, and my second and third fingers are hovering at the ready. At some point I got into the habit of scrolling with fingers 2 and 3 rather than 1 and 2.

Four finger, or really anything requiring me to lift my palm rather than pivot from the keyboard, is absurd though.

One-hand three finger (text select, dictionary lookup, file and window drag and drop) and four finger (expose up and down, virtual desktops left and right) gestures are great on MacBook trackpad. At some point they were default in macOS but now I need to reenable them on every install in both trackpad and accessibility settings. Especially the tree finger one (point + middle + ring fingers) is so much better than click and hold to drag.

Two finger pinch to zoom is such an awkward gesture for me for some reason, but I recently discovered that some Android apps like Google Maps and Edge have an alternate one finger zoom gesture that I find much more intuitive: double tap and drag up to zoom out, and double tap and drag down to zoom in.

I completely disagree. I occasionally use 3-finger swipe to switch between desktops on OS X and the "gentle brushing" motion actually feels more natural than trying to "point and click" with one finger.

Now, to be perfectly fair, I also have CapsLock+Shift+H/L keymapped to do the same thing, as well as two-finger swipe on my mouse. The point is, one doesn't necessarily preclude the other.

Yeah I think this mindset is going to be prevalent with Windows users because these kinds of gestures are not native, while Mac users are comfortable with it since it's integrated in the OS.

It’s also a trackpad vs mouse thing. Three finger gestures work a lot better with the kind of high quality trackpads that the majority of macs come with.

And that is the rub. On my macbook pro, which has what I consider to be a significantly better trackpad, I three-swipe without even thinking about it. but that comes from very tight hardware/software integration.

I have only used Linux for the past decade, but your point still stands as I only get to use crummy windows trackpads. Mac trackpads are indeed much better. I probably would be more amenable to gestures with an actual functional trackpad

I have a FingerWorks iGesturePad on my desk right now, a 17-year-old device which is still to this day the most advanced multi-touch consumer product. My experience with this product teaches me that multi-finger input is not at all unnatural as you call it. You do it all day every day with everything in your life EXCEPT your computer; you would get accustomed to it in minutes or hours.

Didn't Apple buy Fingerworks and used the ideas if not the technology for the mobile devices?

Yes, and the laptop and standalone touchpads as well. Those touchpads are more similar to Fingerworks products than the touchscreen iDevices. I would even argue that Apple's current touchpads with haptic feedback are clearly superior to what Fingerworks offered, if you install third-party software to expand the range of gesture options. I've been using jitouch for close to a decade now, and on a MacBook Pro I use multitouch gestures at least twice as often as I use keyboard shortcuts.

> All that said, the designs in this project are beautiful, and there are some useful-looking interface ideas.

Agreed. I went in after reading some comments and fully expected to dislike it strongly, but there are some nifty ideas.

Might just need to add

- a fallback wm

- keyboard shortcuts (and all OS level shortcuts need to use Super/CMD/Windows so they won't collide with application shortcuts)

On a related note this might not be too much work to implement on top of KDE: it is extremely customizable and has tagging built in.

"Might just need to add

- a fallback wm"

imo this is one of the major reasons windows 8's GUI, Metro, failed. They didn't go all in. I understand the rationale though

> imo this is one of the major reasons windows 8's GUI, Metro, failed. They didn't go all in.

Not sure we'd liked it better if they'd made it completely unusable ;-)

We can rebuild the desktop we have the technology.

I’d only disagree with your ‘I don’t want to remember gestures on a trackpad’- much like keyboard shortcuts, muscle memory makes for very easy pickup of intuitive gestures; there’s little to “remember”. I’m sure nowadays you don’t have to think hard on how to Ctrl/Cmd+C/P/Z?

I think this mindset of mouse over trackpad, as others have mentioned, is to some extent correlated with hardware quality: IMO trackpads on PC/PC laptops just feel bad to use (material texture/accuracy) relative to an Apple trackpad. Latest models are slightly closer in quality.

> muscle memory makes for very easy pickup of intuitive gestures;

The problem with muscle memory is that the gestures vary between operating systems or even different devices on the same OS if the user has changed settings. Your muscle memory ends up getting in the way instead of helping and causes endless confusion.

For anyone that uses vim key bindings or a Dvorak keyboard, they've already priced that into changing their settings, and decided it does not matter.

I dont think this is a valid argument: muscle memory is extremely contextual. Your muscle memory for your phone is definitely different from your laptop, and I don’t think the context switch is actually a hindrance.

This would extend to different devices that don’t share the same hardware (at the tactile/interaction level)

> I’m sure nowadays you don’t have to think hard on how to Ctrl/Cmd+C/P/Z?

Oh, I do it.

I'm so used to C-w/C-y, that if I'm not careful when cutting something and I forgot I'm outside Emacs I'll risk to close a window... ^__^;

Incidentally, this isn't a problem on macOS. I often finding myself wishing that Linux GUI applications and frameworks imitated Apple's keyboard shortcut conventions rather than the derivative scheme that Microsoft ended up with after largely abandoning CUA. Having access to emacs/readline shortcuts on a separate modifier key from the more widely known cmd+X/C/V/etc. stuff is great.

> The reason why the desktop hasn't changed much in 30 years is because it works.

That's not how innovation or success is measured in any way whatsoever. We had alchemy for centuries before Science, it was not right, nor was it good enough because it "just worked". This project is exploring a number of ideas and it reads like you are dismissing it because of the poor writing and its interest in non-traditional input methods. I think you would enjoy re-looking at the project if you just ignored the text.

It is fun to think about how much more usable the desktop could be, and it will be experiments and discussions like this one where we make progress towards that goal.

> No, they're not

I totally agree with you. Mobile sucks for just about everything if someone is used to working on a computer, but it is the case that many millions more people have mobile devices than laptops or desktops. If we could work on a system that gave them more power than the trash we have for them so far, that would be incredible.

E: for what its worth, I tried getting deeper into this in my top level comment further down. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20157536

>That's not how innovation or success is measured in any way whatsoever. We had alchemy for centuries before Science, it was not right, nor was it good enough because it "just worked"

well the problem with alchemy was that it didn't work. The desktop does indeed work in the sense that people who are productive and do heavy work do utilise traditional desktop paradigms. At least I've never seen a highly productive developer who is into tons of touchscreens and arcane finger gestures.

I don't really see how the performance of well configured keyboard commands is supposed to be beaten by voice or touch input, because physically the former is just significantly faster, and importantly, composable.

I like Newtonian physics better as a comparison. Is it a perfectly accurate system that solves all problems? No, it doesn't handle very small things or very fast things. But it's a pretty good model for anything I need to do with it.

I do like some of the ideas here though - especially the fullscreen column mode. It feels like a more powerful and flexible version of the multitasking in macOS plus what's coming in iPad OS. I think it'd fit right in on Mac, if they could figure out an intuitive way to interact with that windowing model.

Not sold on their trackpad gestures. No issues with multi-finger gestures in general, but I like having 3-finger drag as a direct interaction with my content instead of taking 3-fingers to interact with the window manager. Definitely wouldn't want want to go back to the old double-tap-and-drag.

> I do like some of the ideas here though - especially the fullscreen column mode. It feels like a more powerful and flexible version of the multitasking in macOS plus what's coming in iPad OS. I think it'd fit right in on Mac, if they could figure out an intuitive way to interact with that windowing model.

There is a very mac-like feel to this concept. I think it would fit right in. I like that the Panels tell a strong story of incentives: That vertical space is important and at the same time that excessive and persistent menu bars are explicitly not important.

I also like your example about Newtonian Physics, I'll remember that one.

I like the other user's response to your first line.

> At least I've never seen a highly productive developer who is into tons of touchscreens and arcane finger gestures.

I totally agree, it would be silly and I imagine entertaining to watch for only just as long as it took to become incredibly annoyed by the scene. I do think, however, that we don't know what the peak of developer productivity is (nor if we should strive for it, but that's a different conversation). We don't know how humans should interact with computers and how tasks can potentially be represented by different software and hardware paradigms.

There are all kinds of keyboards. Chorded, the Space Cadet, Cannon Cat, European vs US. I don't know anything about Asian language keying but I imagine it would lend an interesting perspective as well. Bill Buxton has a gallery of input devices that is fascinating. [1]

Today, to generalize, the most productive people use the standard system of the Desktop. But they also extensively use paper and conversation and walls of post-its or whatever their shtick; in the future I imagine that we will bring computing capabilities to these more human styles of expression. That, I believe, will look and feel nothing like the Desktop.

[1]: https://www.microsoft.com/buxtoncollection

Sure, it's not how innovation is measured; self-evidently, something that hasn't changed much in decades is not innovative (anymore).

But it is how success is measured. The closer to ideal a product is, the less it needs to change. Think Coke, Excel, bicycles, SQL, etc. After an initial "Cambrian explosion" in each field, the product was stabilized and perfected.

I hate both Excel and SQL. Well, SQL isn't half-bad, but something like a composable GUI with a proper AWK plugin would be far better than that laggy and shitty "spreadsheet".

ooh, I've got to push back on that one. Just because I can't figure this idea out for myself, maybe this conversation will help.

> The closer to idea a product is, the less it needs to change.

Now that I read this line again I realize yes it is true, but let me push back against the implied claim. I don't think that the Desktop 'needs to change less' because it is 'close to an ideal product.'

I'll propose that the Desktop doesn't change because it is entrenched. There are plenty of good, and more importantly, clear ideas about how personal computing can be made both more powerful and easier for the end user. What we have now is the result of capitalistic incentives. What we should have is deep knowledge work machines and fantastic end user programming capabilities.

Fun conversation starters below, not relevant to the larger discussion, but just thoughts I have in response to your post. I'd enjoy a response just to the above paragraph.

Coke may be an ideal sugar drink, but that seems like a measly category in which to be an ideal product. I can imagine Coke consumption rates dropping over time. (To counter my point, I did find that Coke stock has risen 20% in the last 5 years, compared to S&P500 rising ~15% in the same time). I can imagine them dropping due to the rising popularity and variety of other daytime casual drinks. I can imagine them dropping due to the increasing public awareness of the mal-effects of sugar. I'm sure Coke the company will do fine, but they could have used their clout over the last 100 years to spearhead a global health campaign, and they didn't. So I don't think they are an ideal product which doesn't need to change.

Excel came about pretty quickly (I don't know the specific history of MS Excel) but considering its predecessors. Visicalc was a reason on its own to buy early desktop machines. I've heard of university departments buying early workstations just to permanently run visicalc. But that still doesn't make Excel ideal. Chris Granger has done a lot of work recently to evolve spreadsheets (more focused on programming, but they are intertwined). You could look at Light Table and Eve and say they were a failure because they didn't end up as a business, but I think that kind of product is inevitable in the near future as the access interface that average people will use computers with.

I think you're right about Bicycles. They are an incredible engineering development from almost every perspective. Maybe some pointers to the views Engelbart and more have about training wheels would be interesting to this conversation though. Those are a "thing" that stuck around for quite a while, and appear to not really help the learning of riding a bike. [1]

I don't know enough about SQL. SQLite is something like the most popular database in the world right?

[1]: http://worrydream.com/refs/Vannevar%20Bush%20Symposium%20-%2... search: "training wheels" there is one occurrence.

> The reason why the desktop hasn't changed much in 30 years is because it works.

Thank you. I am always amazed at why this is apparently so hard to understand to so many people. Perhaps most of them are young and the drive to innovate (for the sake of innovation) is simply so strong that it makes them ignore simple truths of life? In regards to desktop interface I so wish that many more companies and projects understood this already and stopped wasting our time with new fancy "ways to operate desktop"...

It's easy: the screen is a rectangle of pixels that needs to present information. We have inputs. For the inputs, the keyboard and mouse works the best. There are some other tools and there is some variation, but in essence, that's it. It is simply the best way to operate a desktop for a human. Out of those two initial variables there are only so many ways to organize the multitasking of that information, and we have figured it out already. The human design is not going to change for many more decades, the way information works in this universe is not going to change, the way point to things on a screen is not going to change, etc.

I guess humans, despite being very sophisticated neural networks (ok and perhaps some other architectures mixed into them), still do get stuck in local maxima, and knowing that tend to do that, they always try to get out of the maxima where they find themselves, just in case, to try to come up with a new maxima, to see and figure out if they have missed something. It makes sense and thank god for all those people trying to do this and innovate for the sake of innovation. But to me at least it seems very certainly that the desktop as it is today (and in many ways as it has been for 30 years) - is the global maxima of computing interface. We don't need another way, this is the best way already. Solutions to some problems are just created very early. Sometimes the traditional is the best.

I am probably what they call a power user. There are few people who can pick up interfaces as quickly as me. I tried really hard to make my smartphone productive and I kinda managed (wrote a thesis on it to a big degree during waits at bus stops).

That means I really spent some time looking into productivity on smartphones and still didn't manage to get it somewhere comparable to a desktop PC after years of trying. The best thing was using an external keyboard, but then I could use my notebook as well.

I think the first quote is pretty accurate.

OS owners are trying to adapt their OSes so they work across desktop and mobile, but as a result, the desktop OSes are far less productive.

A classic example was Windows 8, but Mac OS has become far less productive as well. Just look at the new Marzipan based apps, or the push for "Full Screen everything!" which is the complete opposite of the OS X paradigm.

In the Linux world as well, icons and buttons have been made unnecessarily larger to serve potential mobile and touch usage.

Have you had to buy a new computer screen lately? When you're running a Linux desktop at 200dpi or more you will appreciate the larger icons. But on low res screens this immediately feels like a waste of space, partially because dpi scaling is such a mess.

> In the Linux world as well, icons and buttons have been made unnecessarily larger to serve potential mobile and touch usage.

Please choose more specific language for that last point, because while I agree generally I only see ~two desktop projects (Unity and KDE) that have prioritized touch in the foss world (vs. the couple dozen others that haven't).

Meanwhile if I started using libinput-gestures and tweaked my Awesome config a bit I could have a desktop that more or less replicated the OP.

Seems weird to design an desktop that only works with computers that have trackpads. It's basically a laptop only OS, even then though it doesn't work for a huge swath of people who prefer trackpoint.

Most laptops don't have eye tracking either. I believe this concept is explicitly ignoring backwards compatibility with existing hardware in favor of trying to envision the best UI possible with current technology.

It's also worth noting that the ideas they're proposing already exist, at least to a large extent. The "panel" system just looks like a tilling window manager, tags were a thing on BeOS and are implemented on userspace by KDE etc. for global search to work better and you can already control your PC by touch & voice, macOS puts Siri front & center for that matter, (not that I think that's a good thing).

> This seems to be very much change for the sake of it.

That's fine. I'm all for people experimenting. My opinion is that this "rethink" has been rethunk multiple times now and hasn't found enough friends to be successful, but hey; maybe all those other attempts at a 'productive' rework of the traditional desktop were just poorly implemented and this is The One!

What I am most thankful for is that this isn't being imposed on some existing, working, healthy desktop environment. I have suffered through too many iconoclastic desktop nightmares. They've all failed and had to be reverted and I loathe the thought of suffering another one. Metro, early KDE Plasma, Unity... I'm fed up with it and I'll bounce from whatever platform tries to put me through it again.

If this or any other desktop "rethink" is really so wonderful and amazing that it deserves to appear someplace that matters then let it demonstrate that by accruing a following on its own merits; DO NOT try to foist it onto some innocent captive audience. All that does is generate an epic amount of immortal hate for your work.

Having used a tiling window manager like i3, I disagree.

The desktop metaphor isn't as productive as a tiling wm, and using one at work is so tedious compared to what I can do at home.

> This seems to be very much change for the sake of it.

It seems like exploration more than change. You seem to dislike the ideas without providing much substance other than reiterating the cliche "if it ain't broke don't fix it." It's unfortunate this is the top comment as this type of feedback doesn't provide much for the author or anyone else. Is there something specific you dislike other than change itself?

Not op, but I agree with them. To me, it's more like "if it ain't broke, don't break it". We already know how anti-productive mobile UI is and we've already seen attempts to make desktops more mobile-like fail hard (e.g. Windows 8).

> It may not be the prettiest or the most modern or even the easiest for a new computer user to navigate, but it works damned well for getting work done.

Just to troll a little-- the "prettiest or the most modern" comment leads me to believe you're arguing for desktop applications which get installed to the OS as opposed to applications which run in the browser. But I find browser apps as accessed on the desktop to be prettier, more modern, easier to discover, easier to install/re-install/remove, more accessible, and vastly easier for collaboration, than the native applications written for a given platform. On the desktop they run much faster than on mobile. And the thing is plugged directly into the wall so you don't have to worry about battery drain.

(The one caveat to this being audio/video/3d creation-- for most of that you still need proprietary native applications for workable and stable UX.)

I'd really like some kind of Linux distro that boots me straight into Firefox's most stable auto-upgrading release, then have some keyboard shortcut to gracefully degrade down to xfce Debian or whatever for everything else. Perhaps with a default dialog:

"Warning: you are about to drop down to a Debian box. Refresh Button, Back Button, Touchpad, Audio, Wireless, and Fonts will all be set to Frustration Mode. Ok?"

Funny I went back to XFCE out of frustration of the more modern desktop experience on other DEs

Elementary's Pantheon is very nice until you have to consistently work for hours a day on something Same goes for Gnome/KDE with KDE coming second just after XFCE for its ability to set the scale factor to decimals

True information ergonomics is subtle, you need a fair amount of laissez-faire so the user feels in control but at the same time fill gaps at the right time.

I remember being shocked at an old AS400 application that was so lean, easy to learn and use and so useful. It blew any admistrative or even web (new trend at the time) application I've used in every dimensions.

Of course it was about to be retired and replaced by .. a web app.

Ditto, that's why I hate today MS Access and all that shiny crap.

With a simple TCL TUI interface to some SQLite database, you could do the same stuff even with a built-in help with no effort at all, and running with half of the resources.

Phones and iPads _are_ much easier to use, for a lot of things. Not necessarily for writing essays or doing spreadsheets, but there is a whole range of things that are significantly quicker and more intuitive on mobile.

Remember Windows 8? BARF!

Yes, his opinion and concept feel amateurish to me. A yet another GUI designed by a designer.

What matters in GUI is an often overlooked thing called ergonomics — something beyond just code and visual design.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergonomics

For what its worth, I recall this was like a student project from 2016 or something. I could be wrong, but it seemed like an impressive output under the circumstances.

You're not wrong. At the bottom of the page is a link to the HN submission:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10932378

Thanks for pointing this out.

I find the Windows UI to often have infuriatingly poor ergonomics, especially when it comes to mouse usage. For instance, why the heck put that closing cross button so far away on the right, which will build you some arm pain quite fast ? Why are some overly used buttons so small ?

When I watch people that are not used to keyboard shortcuts use Windows (explorer for example), I'm quite terrified at their painful, and consequently slow, mouse-based workflow.

one reason might be because with the fully opened window, the 'close window' cross is in the top right corner of the screen which is one of the infinitely large targets.

> yet another GUI designed by a designer.

That’s a weird complaint. I’t like saying “yet another application programmed by a programmer”. Well, who else is going to do it? It’s right there in the name!

I’m guessing your objection has to do with a GUI being built by a designer that has a sense of visual hierarchy but no sense of usability/interactivity/ergonomics. I’m not sure if that’s the case here, but with that I can agree.

>Desktop is far more productive than mobile ever will be or can be.

Really ?

Ask any non technical user to open an app that is not on the desktop, or to find a picture hidden in some random folder.

Ask anyone to do any real work – i.e. to be productive – on mobile and watch them struggle, at least in relative terms vs. how they'd fare using a real computer.

Smartphones cannot cheat Fitts's law, they will always be much slower to use than desktop computers.

> Ask any non technical user to open an app that is not on the desktop, or to find a picture hidden in some random folder.

What does it have to do with productivity? Ask them to find a picture 100000 times on a smartphone and on a desktop having similarly capable software but with smartphone/desktop specific UI features. But you didn't suggest that, because I'm sure you intuitively realize how ridiculous this comparison is.

> Smartphones cannot cheat Fitts's law, they will always be much slower to use than desktop computers.

Why would Fitt's law have anything to do with smartphones being slower? If anything, it is the opposite.

A phone screen is smaller, so all targets will be close to each other - and Fitt's law says these will be faster to access than on the large screen of a desktop.

BTW, that's also why interfaces on mobile have big icons with lots of white space around them - Fitt's law says that bigger targets are faster and easier to reach.

To fit equivalent desktop functionality to the smartphone you have to make targets either smaller, which will make them impossibly slow to use, or hide them behind other targets, which again will make them slower to use requiring hitting multiple targets instead of one. I.e. can't cheat Fitts's law.

> targets will be close to each other

Close to each other targets are effectively smaller targets, because the area you are hitting them with has some dimensions and has to fit in a smaller area to avoid hitting closer targets too.

But in desktop everything will be far away, so it doesn't provide any advantage either. And hitting the targets that are visible will be faster on mobile.

What does discoverability has to with productivity ? Is that a serious question ?

> non-technical

Do non-technical users typically do a lot of actual work on their mobile devices? Ask a developer to write a full software suite on a phone and you'll get basically the same response that you're describing, just from the other direction. This analogy just doesn't work because it's simply the statement that people who don't know how to do X will struggle to do X.

>Do non-technical users typically do a lot of actual work on their mobile devices?

What does it has to with anything ? the discussion is about desktop UI.

And non technical users are a large chunk of people doing work with computers .. devs are a minority. I am not sure why I need to mention this point, but looks like that's where we are.

> it's simply the statement that people who don't know how to do X will struggle to do

That's a tautology .. if the only test for an UI is whether it is usable with step by step instruction, there is no distinction between e.g. MSDOS and Windows 10.

>>"The traditional desktop computer is struggling to adapt the simple interfaces of mobile devices while also keeping its focus on productivity."

>No, no, it isn't. Desktop is far more productive than mobile ever will be or can be.*

Only because it has more freedom (to run all kinds of apps, services, etc). Not because it necessarily offers better interactions.

Most people are far better at what they do with their mobile phone, than with their desktop OS.

> Most people are far better at what they do with their mobile phone, than with their desktop OS.

Maybe instagram influencers, but what about developers, media producers, authors, and on and on and on where high output of creative work is the goal?

Or any job that requires creating documents or spreadsheets, managing inventory, and so on and so forth. A small business might start out doing these things on a mobile device, but a some point you just are not going to be productive trying to keep up with these things without a PC.

The closest to using a mobile device for "real work" that I see regularly in the real world are those Square POS systems that are basically just a tablet on a stand with a card reader. Beyond that, it's just things like vendors at a farmer's market or something. Not really high volume.

Fortunately some people ignore the standard "realistic" advice that doing a thing is pointless because the status quo is good enough.

Perhaps the desktop is adequate for you, but for some of us the thoughts come so quickly that the interface becomes an immense bottleneck. For some types of work, tmux, zsh,and a low latency terminal ease the pain. For other types of work, a highly optimized GUI is beneficial.

I welcome new experiments in user interfaces. While Neo might not be "the solution", it might bring new ideas that eventually get used in other better solutions.

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