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Comment by ajnin | Hacker News Reader

One of the main problems with UX in my opinion is that someone arrives, sees a problem in their own eyes, and try to make changes and impose their views on everyone. Because a lot of that is personal preference, taste, habits, ability, and so on. You can't have a one size fits all solution. If you try you end up discovering that there are many dimensions and that people are scattered around in the space. And either you try to remove dimensions, and yay suddenly you have a one-size-fits-all solution but only because you removed choice (Google is a big offender in that regard), or you realize that you have no right to impose your views, get more humble, and propose a new solution, expanding the choice of others (but that is rare).

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The problem, in my opinion, isn't that they "do", but they "can". Once the windowing system gave up control, it disempowered the user. For example, allowing apps to change the window chrome. For me that was basically the end of usability of WIMP. We no longer have a strong separation of concerns. we need that back, and we need the user to be in charge of the behavior of the windowing system. my strong preference, for example, is that I cannot interact with any window that doesn't have focus until I give it focus. At some point in the last 20 years, that standard was broken, and I have been stuck ever since accidentally doing things to windows that don't have focus.

Some window managers let you configure that. Tiling WMs in particular are better for that kind of thing, IMO.

I don’t think the “desktop metaphor” is particularly important or useful. It seems more like a gimmick to help people who’ve never used a computer before have something concrete to cling to. If you take away the desktop, tiling WMs are a natural place to end up. (Not that you can’t have a desktop with icons etc. in a tiling WM, but it loses a lot of its significance and isn’t really needed.)

You need that to do drag and drop with one mouse-down and one mouse-up.

Given that, the designer can decide if that’s an exception and everything else requires click-to-focus before being interactive, or to use focus-follows-mouse. People really seem to have individual preferences on this, so there’s no one right answer.

I think this is why FVWM is around for so long, OpenBSD even still ships it as the default. The configuration is painful but every tiny thing can be adapted. I stopped using it though because other DEs were more actively maintained and so much quicker to configure.

Considering the base version of fvwm is no longer supported by anyone on planet Earth, it's there because it's deraad's preference, and that's fine.

Newer versions are available in ports.

It's important to remember that fvwm is customisable so it doesn't need to look dated. Given enough time, it's possible to have an environment which suits the individual just fine.

In the wayland world, this is carried over to: https://cow-wm.codeberg.page/cow/

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