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Comment by greggsy | Hacker News Reader

As someone who reads and writes documents all day, I just want a desktop that helps me visualise a stack of messy pages, books and things like calculators or clocks on a desktop. Doesn’t need to be VR, a top-down view would do.

There have been a few cheap looking, janky and slow demos in the ‘oughts and late 90’s, but I’m confident that personal computing is able to do this without significant performance loss, and it’s not such a massive leap from tiled window managers today.

I firmly believe that our current way of managing and interacting with information could benefit from an extra dimension: ragged corners, thickness, persistent placement on a desk, and other attributes that make a paper object much easier to identify, locate and differentiate in real life, compared to a bunch of documents named something something.pdf/docx

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That model of visual-memory-centered skeumorphism died in the 90's. Because for a majority of people, they get no benefit from persistent visual placement of content, or visual differentiation of documents, and can't cope with the "desktop" in REAL life, much less the metaphor that was "every desktop UX between the Mother of All Demoes and the death of even trying that was the iPhone" now people interact with the world through vertically siloed apps which all have different management models for content, and make it easier to charge you feudal rent on what would otherwise be your own possessions.

And what especially galls me is that if you suggest this "skeumorphic" model to OSS devs, they act like you're crazy. Even if it's something simple like "the Indigo Magic Desktop's scalable line art icons that had animated states". Suggesting visual interfaces seems to grossly offend people who develop software.

>Because for a majority of people, they get no benefit from persistent visual placement of content, or visual differentiation of documents

You say that, but I don't think it's true. (I think you even argue against it later in the comment but I'm not sure??)

I agree.

I liked some things that looked more physical/tactile.

To be clear, I don't care if my calculator looks like a desk calculator as much as if clickable buttons show they are clickable. Underlining a link might be inelegant, but it is also functional and immediately knowable.

This is why I think people loved the concept of the "desktop" in Windows. Those that filled it with icons, in their own rows, columns, grids, corners, full of games, applications, documents. To me it is one of Windows's biggest successes. And yet some dismiss it as unecessary and even remove the feature altogether. I think it should be embraced even more, make the messy desktop a first class citizen for people to organize their thoughts, with ways to interact with it without having to minimize all windows. Windows 10's menu did this in a neat-enough way with its customizable menu, what happened to that?

When I moved to macOS back in 2011 (OS X back then), from Windows, I was shocked how much the OS pushes me to organise my digital world better than the mess I had in Windows. I never have piles of stuff in my digital life, it’s uncluttered now.

These days I use Linux with both swaywm on a laptop with Arch do-it-yourself Linux, and mainstream Gnome on a Fedora desktop (workstation edition) with almost no fiddling. Both desktop metaphors allow me to organise my digital world very well.

From that point of view the mess of icons on a Windows desktop looks horrible to me. I dread the very thought of using Windows ever again. I dread I’ll be given the locked Windows laptop and forced to use it.

I know it’s not that bad. Especially, if you just need to perform some tasks in some GUI apps, especially if those are Microsoft apps anyway. Still, I have the fear. My Linux familiarity created me a very vulnerable place of comfort and possibly an illusion the things would be that way forever (for me). Which can be true, actually.

I'm curious about why you're referring to the Windows desktop in particular. Don't pretty much all OSes do that?

Some desktops like GNOME remove the feature altogether.

And I will never forgive them for it. I aggressively uninstall all traces of ubuntu-desktop after a new build, and usually regret doing so by the end of the night.

I think this should be replicated per-project.

The ability to switch to a project, and see all my notes, documents, apps for only that project. In a way that doesn't collide/interfere.

maybe have ~/Desktop/project1, and all apps use that to store settings, notes, etc.

could be a group of desktops for a project.

maybe like virtual desktops for a project in columns, but each row is a different a separate project.

The idea would be close to macos with fast user switching, but one user per project.

A better way to frame it instead of one user per project, is to have one persona (casual me, working me, planning me) per workspace, each of which can only be used by one identity on the whole machine.

Multiple desktop shell sessions per user. Oh yeah, that would rock

lol, I wasn't framing it in terms of users, it was just that you could corrupt fast user switching, which exists, to be fast project switching (which needs to exist).

I'm working on a modern 3d filesystem, ala fsn/fsv, (in godot 4.3), as part of a bigger project. I think the spatial opportunities will scratch that itch for some people.

You just reminded me of "bumptop" - which I had totally forgotten about:

https://github.com/bumptop/BumpTop/wiki#background

Interesting to see it's up on github

I think this is one of the janky PoC’s I recalled from the ‘oughts. I don’t really like large touch surfaces (they remind me of broken interactive displays in museums), but I’m surprised the concept hasn’t evolved further.

I find it remarkable that there really doesn't seem like a lot of momentum to innovate the desktop. I'm dead sick of Windows and Mint is just a carbon copy.

I want several, hard, discrete desktops. I want one that I can toss a bunch of graphics files onto that has something kin to "Fences" so I don't have to navigate the file explorer. And with the flick of a button I can move to a different desktop that I've set up for work, one for play and etc... I think Ubuntu used to have something similar, though I wouldn't be surprised if it actually behaves much like Windows and is just a window manager.

I do a lot on the desktop to specifically avoid the file manager because file managers seem to be intrinsically unnavigable. And then there's inconsistencies between applications which is enough to press me ever closer to an aneurysm. Going between the Win10 file explorer and one from Win95 a la ImageJ is awful.

Shit, with a system like that I reckon you could almost get away without a file explorer.

windows 11 does have the option of discrete desktops. not sure if that is what you are referring to.

I'd say it has the opposite, the desktop itself is shared among several virtual environments. However, I believe W8 did have it.

You know how you swipe between pages on a phone desktop? Organize all the logically coherent things together for productivity and badda bing badda boom.

And Fences does that, mostly. It has "pages" and the "Fences" themselves. Implementation is... Passable. And unfortunately Stardock's reputation isn't stellar.

It'd be nice to see a native system for Windows or Linux that replicates it.

I'm on Windows 11, and when I click the "Task View" button which is usually right next to the windows button on the task bar, I get a layout of all my open windows on my current desktop. But there is a ribbon across the bottom of the screen that shows "Desktop 1" and "Desktop 2" and another with "Add Desktop".

I can have a dozen windows spread out all across my 3 monitors on desktop 1 and a different windows placed on Desktop 2. when I switch to desktop 2, it switches the whole view to the other windows.

And now, as I write this and test it out, I realize that you must be talking about the icons on the desktop rather than the open programs? That would make sense, because those icons do stay the same no matter which desktop.

I guess I just never thought about that because I almost never use desktop icons anymore. I just hit the windows key on the keyboard and start typing to find what I want. I actually rarely even see my actual desktop, because that would require me to close everything or minimize everything to see the icons and that is just an extra step.

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