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Comment by kagia | Hacker News Reader

I for one think it's time we saw bold and ambitious attempts at changing the desktop.

Most desktops today are arguably variations of the desktops we were introduced to in windows95 and OSX (v10). The colours, placement and names change but rarely does anything new show up (save for metro desktop).

With wayland and mutter/qt+ this is a great time to try out wild and out-there concepts. It's the only way to break out and really change the desktop.

I can understand peoples frustration; the desktop, after all, wraps up everything we experience when we use our machines. However I will approach this with an open mind, and I certainly hope others will do the same.

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In my personal opinion, Windows 95 was pretty much the benchmark for how to build an intuitive and productive desktop environment.

There's obviously a few things that have come since that have improved upon it (eg quick search in the start menu / launcher, and the way how Linux better groups applications in it's launchers than Windows does in it's start menu) as well as mistakes made since (Windows quick launch start menu tool bar being one prime example). But for me, Microsoft really did create the design concept of optimal working environment.

Obviously this is just my preferences - many would disagree. But I think the reason why there are so many variations on the Windows 95 desktop is because many people feel like myself in that it's a paradigm that works extremely well for them too.

I agree and many attempts to push away from the Windows 95 design in order to be different have been usability nightmares

I've had a lot of people have good experiences with the Unity launcher. It is highly divisive from anything else on the market (it is a search frame always with filtering tabs) but does its job nicely. Homerun from KDE acts the exact same, except it is a full screen version.

>I for one think it's time we saw bold and ambitious attempts at changing the desktop.

I'd ask what problem we're trying to solve. I think desktops should be out of the way. I don't really use "a desktop" for anything. I just need a way to launch and switch between applications, and that's a solved problem in my opinion.

Totally agree with you!

The problem though is getting rid of the desktop would not go down well with the majority. you'd need a way of proving that you can still make multi tasking painless. Currently a desktop environment means I can resize and arrange windows to allow me to work with multiple apps.

One idea is have some sort intelligent system for deciding how much screen real estate is needed for each app and how they can be grouped and arranged into sensible workspaces.

You mean a tiling window manager?

not really. there is nothing wrong with overlapping, and most tiling WM'S are user managed in some way.

The shell in Gnome 3 is arguably also a departure from win9x/osx desktop paradigm (it took some ideas from the latter, but it went in a direction different enough that I consider it its own different thing). It received quite a bit of backlash.

I love it.

You say this as if nobody else out there is attempting to really radically change the desktop, which isn't true. Lots and lots of distributions and platforms are — you're provably just not familiar with them (not a swipe at you at all, by the way, but it goes to show that these things don't always catch on like wildfire). Also, re:desktop metaphor dating back to OSX/95, try 1984 and the original Mac and shortly thereafter windows 1.0 :p. (or really, Doug Engelbart some years before all of that!)

>not a swipe at you at all

no problem! :)

> Most desktops today are arguably variations of the desktops we were introduced to in windows95

That's simply because win95 was really that good. I, for one, think that there's no need to change what already works quite well.

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