If you want a fleshed out demo [0], we had the author present at our conference recently. Worth a watch.
Stunning attention to detail - font choice on install, dynamic file renaming, open file highlighting, tabbed windows with apps inside. These felt so intuitive to me as I watched. Vector based UI - excellent choice!
Watching the demo brought back memories of OS/2 and BeOS in terms of aesthetics and usability. The theme designer blew me away - it looked like Sketch or Adobe XD in terms of UI prototyping. If this offers a way to draw your UI with vector based tools and have it "attached" to the OS's API then that's really exciting.
Further, if this could be extended to a VB style application where one can code in actions, events etc in a user accessible way [1] then I think it would be a killer app for this OS where a user/developer could shape the entire OS to fit the needs of the design.
I'm thinking here of a single use OS on a USB stick - for example, a writer's OS where the whole OS/Apps just provide a rich environment for wordsmiths to work in creative isolation. Like the "Zen" mode of many editors, but taken to the next level. Glorious looking dictionaries, pinboards for notes and research etc etc. Design the UI, apps and utilities and compile it all into a single, bootable OS would be wonderful. That would be very satisfying to me the way my mind is wired.
[1] To be clear, a language which is approachable by beginners, e.g. BASIC like or some high level scripting language. Also pluggable languages would be very cool for advanced workers.
I know there are Vector based icons and graphics set in other OS or Desktop Environment, but is this the first time the whole UI being Vector based? Lots of interesting thoughts and experiment in modern day Vector UI capabilities.
However once GUIs started relying on using bitmaps for drawing parts of the theme things got a bit less vector-y. But that happened later.
[0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/windows_protocols...
Wow. Just wow. I wish everything in my life was designed like this.
Very impressive, amazing amount of work went into it clearly.
I do not like GNOME 3 at all myself. A lot of the features that the developers are proud of – things like CSD, no menu bars, that big empty wasted panel with no indicator icons, the clear empty desktop with no desktop icons and so on – are the specific things I do not like.
I still use Unity on Ubuntu. One of my machines has the latest version of the Unity remix on it: https://ubuntuunity.org/
... but little regressions are accumulating. I can't empty the wastebasket from the dock any more; the volume control works but mousewheel control is now reversed (down is up, and up is down, although I have "natural scrolling" turned off); Firefox doesn't support the global menu bar any more; and so on.
It seems to me that a lot of modern desktops are removing features, or changing features (like the disappearance of menu bars), because people today don't know how to use them. Since they don't know how, they don't use them, so they feel that these features are not important, so they remove them.
Similarly, Windows 11 has now lost support for vertical taskbars. KDE has it but it's broken, as it was in GNOME 2 and now is in MATE. Cinnamon has a crude form, but it can't arrange status icons in rows, only in columns, which wastes a huge amount of space... but I suspect they've never seen a vertical taskbar, so they don't know how it should work.