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Comment by aredox | Hacker News Reader

The state of desktop paradigms has been one of great stagnation, if not outright regression. The VR fad is never going anywhere: its problems are an order of magnitude worse and engineers and companies nowadays seem unable to do basic 2D interface right.

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I agree. In my opinion, the problem is that Microsoft and Apple discovered more lucrative markets, making their desktops less important. For Apple, the iPhone’s revenue completely dwarfs the Mac’s, and even services bring in more revenue than the Mac. Microsoft still makes a lot of money selling Windows licenses to OEMs and corporations, but somehow Microsoft still feels compelled to extract even more money from Windows by placing ads in the OS and by selling subscription services.

As a fan of desktop GUI software that conforms to well-developed platform UI guidelines such as the old Apple Human Interface Guidelines, I believe the rise of mobile computing and the Web hurt the desktop. Software companies ship cross-platform applications using least-common-denominator frameworks instead of writing apps with UIs that are tailor-made to each platform. While this saves development time, and while it’s popular to say “having an Electron app is better than having no app,” it makes the desktop experience less consistent and more difficult to use. In addition, the desktop UI has become more mobile-like even in ways that are inappropriate for desktop computing, such as the proliferation of hamburger windows, the tendency to hide settings (thus requiring additional clicks to perform operations that used to be done in one or two clicks), oversized bars, title bars being crammed with buttons (making it harder to move windows via dragging the title bar), excessive padding, etc. There is a difference between making things easier for users versus dumbing things down, but I feel that a lot of software designers these days don’t know the difference.

I would like to see a return to UI consistency across applications, and I’d also like to see a desktop environment that caters to power users.

A dream of mine is some type of “component-based” desktop operating system, where everything is an object that can be manipulated through either a GUI, the command line, or programmatically. The backend would be inspired by technologies like Smalltalk, GNU Emacs, Lisp machines, and Apple OpenDoc, but with modern considerations such as security and parallelism.

A lot of blame gets placed on mobile, but the problem predates it. Windows being the leader refused to implement any notable standards for decades and still doesn't. This led to standards developed for mobile getting applied elsewhere, just because there's no other standard really and Microsoft's official stance is just to use those same mobile standards anyways, and to allow developers to do whatever they want anyways.

Standardizing on an established shared standard was never motivating for Microsoft. Early they profited by ensuring backwards compatibility for ridiculous periods of time. That was their pitch to customers. Buy your software and it will likely still work in 10 years. Even when shifting from dos pre NT windows you had an OS that allowed programs that thought they had sole control of the machine to continue to run by using some fairly sophisticated techniques and features introduced with the 386. Their model: get users, keep users, get recurring profit was their model. Standardizing on anything didn't really matter unless a significant user base wanted it.

And not having open or shared standards was viewed as a feature to drive down competition.

ATT started out UNIX with their hands tied. Hence BSD was birthed and then later ATT tried to put the genie back in the bottle. But it the economics were different. Hardware costs were the main driver. The OS was a given.

Starting over sounds great. But if history repeats itself, which it usually does, then we are far more likely to see something take (copy) ideas from current OSes and evolve them rather than a radical sea change where we star over.

Also now that Microsoft is shifting (shifted?) to a business model where selling OSws isn't really profitable will their behavior change?

I really notice this when I play PC games. They are easy to get into, they are highly customizable, and they teach you bit by bit until you're pretty powerful at doing things.

Each game though is super narrow, and is built on OS primitives already established. An OS must be all things to all users and all devs, so some complexity and bloat are inevitable.

Users don't want to start from scratch to learn every program they need. Also, they often bounce off of games with controls outside their comfort zone.

Phones are stagnating too. I don’t remember anything really innovative coming to my iPhone for at least 5 years. It’s just slow evolution. Hope phones won’t go the path of desktop where it seems they are making them worse with every release.

> Hope phones won’t go the path of desktop where it seems they are making them worse with every release.

Got some bad news for ya...

However at least Apple and Google are trying to use something else other than plain C and C++, with proper full stack frameworks.

Microsoft keeps failing at making .NET more relevant across the whole OS stack, as WinDev keeps pushing for C++ and COM, no matter what, and did a big mess of how UWP could have improved the whole experience, after the Longhorn sabotage from WinDev.

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