8 ms·

On Desktop GUI Minimalism

94 points by netdoll 3y ago

fellowniusmonk 3y ago
I think issues with attempts to redefine pc computing interfaces is that despite what is stated people are not actually starting from first principles when they go to redesign a personal computing GUI interface. Even in this article just a few sentences after stating we should start from first principles he then jumps into the assumption of the "desktop". The baggage of TTY interfaces in textual interfaces and the "desktop" paradigm for GUI interfaces is preventing people from going back to actual first principles for designing personal computing interfaces. Of course I do appreciate that since the title of the articles is minimalist desktop GUIs the assumption of "first principles of computing assuming a desktop analog" is baked into the article, I just think it's insufficient.
- sim7c00 3y ago
  so agree that a lot is not going back, perhaps more just modifying whats there. i think the first rule for me is: computers need to make things more simple for humans. how we control our devices, how we use those controls to do things (like interact with these guis), currentlt the model makes things always difficult and practically ensures people lose immersion of their real life into some device screen and controlscheme. tldr i guess; u can optimise guis etc. but if you dont change the interface to those guis its not reinventing anything. these things work in concert to generate the users experience.
- rollcat 3y ago
  > Even in this article just a few sentences after stating we should start from first principles he then jumps into the assumption of the "desktop". Agree. Although I can see how the idea of "first principles" can be a very difficult starting point. A blank sheet of paper is a scary monster. There's a huge breadth and depth of non-"desktop" GUIs out there, some (like smartphones) are even wildly successful. It's good to explore them for inspiration. Some of my favourites: - Arcan (https://arcan-fe.com/about/ https://arcan-fe.com/about/) - I won't attempt to summarize, just dive in! - SailfishOS (https://sailfishos.org/ https://sailfishos.org/) - mobile UI focused on interaction through gestures / swipes; I've used it as my daily driver for a couple years. - Speaking of mobiles, classic Nokia UIs allowed you to navigate to a specific item in the menu by pressing the corresponding digit on the dial pad. Once you learned where a particular item is, accessing e.g. your SMS inbox was extremely quick. - Apple Watch / WatchOS (https://www.apple.com/watchos/ https://www.apple.com/watchos/) - I've always loved the idea of a device where one of the primary interaction methods was a wheel/dial of some sort. The watch even gives you context-sensitive tactile feedback. - ZUIs in general (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_user_interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_user_interface) and the work of Jef Raskin in particular: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy_(software) - this is the guy who helped design the Macintosh, but his other work took a radically different route. - Magit (https://magit.vc/ https://magit.vc/). Many common git operations are reduced to a couple of keystrokes; the obscure features are more discoverable, and the cumbersome procedures (such as rebasing, or staging individual hunks) become simple and intuitive. Also check out transient (https://github.com/magit/transient https://github.com/magit/transient), which is the "UI toolkit" that powers Magit.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > non-"desktop" GUIs out there, some (like smartphones) are even wildly successful. Smartphone UIs are non-desktop metaphors? They sure seem like a desktop metaphor to me, albeit a very tiny desktop.
    - rollcat 3y ago
      A physical desktop is somewhere you lay out objects and organize work, and desktop GUIs have metaphors for that (windows, icons). A phone is more like a pocket notebook, a camera, a map/compass, etc. You can take it out of your pocket on the subway, in a park, on a date, or during a hike; you turn pages to find the information you need, point and shoot a photo, figure out where you are, write down a phone number, etc. There's very little in common with how you'd use a physical desktop, and early smartphones (pre-2007) that tried too hard to be like a desktop really, really sucked.
- layer8 3y ago
  There isn’t really a lot of alternatives to the "desktop", since it basically just means arranging stuff within a rectangle, and what else would you do on a rectangular screen? The only alternatives are having everything fullscreen, like TUIs, or else tiling windows, so that you never see the actual desktop. Similar for folders. You need a way to visually represent groupings of stuff, and there isn’t a lot of choice besides lists/menus or a two-dimensional layout of proxy items (usually labelled icons). I think we already found out what works best for monitor+mouse+keyboard 20-ish years ago. There's a lot to improve in terms of consistency and various details, but I don’t think there's any new paradigm to be found that would work better.
pengaru 3y ago
That's quite the wall of text I won't be reading...
- MrVandemar 3y ago
  Put it in reader-mode and up the line-height. Much improved.
bluepoint 3y ago
Cool insights in Desktop! I really hope that someone comes up with a desktop metaphor for the hundreds of open browser tabs (which I think are the new bookmarks) that hang open in an endless horizontal list. Imagine tabs which are like documents, can be moved around, minimized, and spatially organized in folders and subfolders. Actually, why does this not exist somehow?
- somnic 3y ago
  There's an extension for firefox called Tree Style Tabs. I never really got into it but some people are quite enthusiastic, pretty similar to what you describe though.
  - bluepoint 3y ago
    This sounds interesting. I will check it out.
    - unicornporn 3y ago
      Even better: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sidebery/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sidebery/
- pacifika 3y ago
  Many people have thousands of bookmarks
- vladxyz 3y ago
  Also see something like this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/panorama-view/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/panorama-view...
- ssnepenthe 3y ago
  It may not be exactly what you have in mind but there is an interesting extension along similar lines (mostly for chrome) called TabFS that mounts your open tabs as a filesystem... https://omar.website/tabfs/ https://omar.website/tabfs/
torstenvl 3y ago
TLDR: How to hack MATE to get window shading and spatial file management à la MacOS 9. Decently cool and interesting, but not worth the hour-long read IMHO.
- Animats 3y ago
  I never got past the "get off my lawn" part. Try some 3D creation tools, such as Autodesk Fusion or Blender. Those face a really hard problem. It took too many years to get 3D CAD and drawing up to a tolerable level. Selection in a cluttered 3D environment took a long time to solve. Most user-level GUIs are addressing a far simpler problem. I'd just like to have borders back. They don't have to be big, or shadowed. Just present. I'm tired of overlapping borderless consoles in Ubuntu. Of web sites where there's a scrollable area with no border. Multiple scrollable areas with no border, as with Discord. Buttons with no indication of the live area. This stuff is borrowed from phones, but does not scale well to larger screens and more controls.
MrVandemar 3y ago
Interesting article, and the author makes some excellent points (especially about the pernicious encroachment of "touch" interfaces for systems that are fundamentally driven by keyboard and mouse on large screens) but they start with speculating about starting from scratch for desktop paradigms and ends up: > What I have now is a reasonable facsimile of the classic Mac OS UI functionality in Linux, minus little niceties like the aforementioned popup folders, and I've found that I need basically nothing beyond that to work incredibly efficiently. While it's one of the killer features of linux that you have enormous flexibility in how you use it and set it up, the screen-shot gives me the heebie-jeebies. Visually it's too noisy. I couldn't concentrate with that clutter screaming in my face. Nb: I'm a i3 + command-line guy.
colordrops 3y ago
Speaking of minimalist desktops, I'm really loving the unix-y philosophy behind sway/i3/hyprland/xmonad. Instead of an integrated desktop environment, you start with the simple window manager (Sway in my case), and pick and choose the tools you need for various things, such as a status bar, notifications, launcher, etc. Unless you really trick it out, there is usually very little on your screen other than the apps you are working with, as these window managers are primarly keyboard driven. Furthermore, I use the tiling functionality heavily. There are about 10 apps I use regularly, and they launch and get bound to a particular workspace on startup. My screen remains uncluttered, with one app filling the viewport, and a single keystroke to switch to the other apps I use. It's pretty close to perfect for my use cases. Lastly, these WMs are all configured through text files, so your exact configuration can be stored in dot files in git. In my case I use Nix, so I can redeploy my exact setup on any machine without any manual configuration.
- bryceneal 3y ago
  Interesting. I've been considering toying around with something similar using i3 and Nix. I hadn't considered binding certain applications to various workspaces, but I like that idea as well. I'm curious if there are any particular guides/examples you would recommend, or whether your Nix config is open source somewhere?
- 0x38B 3y ago
  Sway is fast, minimal, and flexible. Their recommended tools/addons are worth a look: https://github.com/swaywm/sway/wiki/Useful-add-ons-for-sway https://github.com/swaywm/sway/wiki/Useful-add-ons-for-sway From that list I use greetd + tuigreet as my login manager, sway-launcher-desktop for FZF-powered app launching, and wob for lightweight brightness and volume display (send '50' to the wob socket and it'll show 50%; it doesn't get simpler).
- globular-toast 3y ago
  sway (and i3 at work as I'm forced to use X, although this pales in comparison to the author's dire situation) are perfect. I've written several simple text based blocks for i3blocks that makes my DE somehow more functional than the bloated ones. It's just so great getting exactly what you want because you write/compose it yourself (yes, I use emacs). Stumpwm is also very attractive. Less "Unixy" but more Lispy which is a different approach at getting exactly what you want.
Jedd 3y ago
> All computing up to the point of its [Apple Mac] introduction, at least from the "shell" standpoint of launching programs and managing files, was done exclusively through typing commands at the computer; you effectively had to program it, to a degree. The creators of the first Macintosh had the mouse, the desktop metaphor, and the menubar, and did their damnedest to make sure the user of their new paradigm-shifting computer ... The wording has some ambiguity, but it does sound like TFA hasn't heard of Xerox or Perq - perhaps attributing some misplaced invention, rather than popularisation, to Apple. Subsequently reinforced my suspicion: > The spirit of the Macintosh spread throughout all of computing; the GUI was inexorably the future. I think with desktop minimalism there's two broad interpretations - a desktop metaphor that is simple (has (frustratingly) few features), versus one that is complex but can be configured to be simple to operate. I like the fact I can very precisely adjust the width and colour of my window borders, but it's not a configuration item I visit more than once every few years, so I wouldn't say the option adds to the complexity of the interface. (Disclaimer - I've never used MATE.) > Oddly enough, only GNOME has had any kind of distinct vision The author did use KDE early on (version 3, but says they've only been using a computer for a decade and change). They're aware of other desktops, then, including the one that's arguably put the most effort into having a consistent user experience. The discussion on navigating through minimised windows I think boils down to a consideration of how to represent complexity - similarly their discussion of the launcher - almost inevitably a hierarchy is required if we are aiming to 'avoid the keyboard at all costs'. People have different GUI preferences there - mine is generally narrow and deep, over wide and shallow.
- netdoll 3y ago
  > The wording has some ambiguity, but it does sound like TFA hasn't heard of Xerox or Perq - perhaps attributing some misplaced invention, rather than popularisation, to Apple. The way I read it, they were attributing the intercombination of these elements under the desktop metaphor to Apple. Smalltalk existed, the Star existed, PERQ existed, the Lisp Machine GUIs existed and JERQ/Blit existed, but all of these were so substantially different from each other let alone what Apple did that they functionally exerted little influence on the way GUIs developed after the Macintosh launched save for a few odd branches here and there (Oberon anyone?)
BwackNinja 3y ago
MacOS 9 and the spatial desktop metaphor is neat. I went that route for a while. What this misses, however, is that the biggest problem with the desktop interface is that we've substantially increased application complexity and laptops (and even smaller devices) won. As a result, we're trying to answer the question "how we fit our skeuomorphic paradigm in a diminutive form factor". The inspiration involved much larger actual desks and tables where you can freely arrange several documents that are each visible and can be reached at a glance. If you're maximizing the window for a document for reasons beyond helping you focus, then your workspace ahem your screen is too small. The screenshot is 1920x1080. Screens are sold using buzzwords like 'HD', 'UHD', and 'retina' that evoke a sense of image clarity. I spent years telling my dad that I liked higher resolutions because it meant more /space/ and he couldn't grasp what I meant. He was stuck on associating higher resolution with clarity until I bought him a 43" 4k monitor, and he used it for a while. Even at 1.5x scaling, suddenly, he was able to view multiple pages of a document clearly at the same time without even scrolling. This isn't at all a normal desktop setup or the kind of setup that desktop environments are optimizing for or advocating. But it works better and better matches the inspiration.
- alwayslikethis 3y ago
  For many people, the limiting factor of this is visual acuity though. I personally can't see it useful to have more than 2560x1440 equivalent pixels of space on a 27 inch monitor. For a larger monitor, you have to sit further back, so it is effectively the same. If you want to see more clearly, you'd need to get closer, but that causes issues since you are still limited by your available field of view.
  - shric 3y ago
    I'd probably agree with the "useful" but I find higher resolution more aesthetically pleasing, especially text.
    - netdoll 3y ago
      Conversely, I find anything above 1920x1080 very displeasing precisely because it removes my ability to practically use bitmapped fonts. Subpixel antialiasing is very distracting and Retina (IMHO) is a solution in search of a problem when it comes to making user interfaces that are actually aesthetic and easy on the eyes. I'm autistic and have diagnosed vision problems tho, so that probably feeds into it for better or worse.
Avshalom 3y ago
It's a shame that rox filer is functionally dead and the rox desktop ecosystem (small as it was) is even dead-er I think author would have enjoyed it.
- netdoll 3y ago
  ROX is one of those things which is great except for the ecosystem it tied itself to. I would love to see a Wayland rewrite one day, or something using the same concepts. Or really anything that isn't r/unixporn tile rice #9001
  - sillywalk 3y ago
    You can run RiscOS on a Raspberry Pi. It's what's rox is based on I believe. RiscOS is quite nice to use, but it is .. limited. No wifi for instance. And the filesystem uses . (dots) for folder separators, so xfering files can be a pain.
bstar77 3y ago
Two years ago, I transitioned to a minimalist tiling window manager (WM) despite my initial reservations about them. This change was prompted by my desire to experiment with high-end hardware and a 4K multi-monitor setup in a tiled environment. Surprisingly, the switch turned out to be a game-changer, boosting my productivity significantly, with around 90% of my tasks now occurring in the terminal. Traditional criticisms of terminals, such as memorization challenges and lack of guidance, no longer apply, thanks to modern features like auto-completion, interactive history, suggestions, and plugins like Git integration. Unfortunately, the reluctance to embrace this minimalist, terminal-centric approach may hinder power users from unlocking its full potential due to long-standing biases and a fear of change.
- Skyywalker 3y ago
  Which terminal app do you use? It sounds like one I would like to try. Thank you.
  - netdoll 3y ago
    I believe most of the things OP mentioned have to do with the shell and not the terminal. At the very least, most of the things thus mentioned can be configured in zsh (I don't know how, as I haven't looked into it really)
  - bstar77 3y ago
    This is what my desktop looks like: https://i.imgur.com/Mo9ku4W.png https://i.imgur.com/Mo9ku4W.png https://i.imgur.com/pq3fwBk.png https://i.imgur.com/pq3fwBk.png I use Kitty for my terminal, i3 for my window manager, vifm for my file manager, vim/neovim for my editor and Firefox. All of my virtual desktops handle different things, like watching movies, doing AI projects, web work, game development, graphics work, etc. You can do all of this stuff in Windows or on a Mac, but I'm using minimal resources with a highly streamlined workflow. Everything that I can script, I script. I also use Zsh with quite a few plugins so the terminal itself isn't so important. I use Kitty because it's fast, can render graphics, is well documented and has a ton of features.
- 3y ago
40yearoldman 3y ago
Minimal desktops are productivity boosters. On top of that ones that can be controlled by keyboard input are super important. 99% of the time you just want information. Text. The chrome does not matter. Yet modern desktops and web pages make humans hunt and pick through poorly designed interfaces to get the info we need. I use EXWM. It’s a time saver. I have no desktop because I am either using the full screen for a single application or flip flopping between a few apps that share the entire screen. This means every pixel of the screen is used and not wasted on useless images of empty fields. In top of that I am able to designate windows and frames for specific jobs or functions, always able to recall the last terminal or most relevance. We fucked up with movable windows. They are inefficient complicated and bring little value over a simple list of activities to switch between.
- jwells89 3y ago
  I believe this is kind of thing is highly subjective as well as dependent on hardware. Point in case fullscreening anything but an IDE or graphics editor on a 27"+ monitor drives me crazy because most things don't make good use of the extra space. Similarly I find tiled smaller windows irritating because they often size themselves incorrectly, ironically making for more manual window twiddling and micromanagement than I'd be doing with a boring old floating window manager.
  - 40yearoldman 3y ago
    Tiling -- split left and right or up and down... This is the case within in Emacs. Given I use a much larger screen I can assure you it works well.
- kaba0 3y ago
  > just want information. Text Text is a not an information-dense medium, and for many kind of data it simply sucks. Also, please don’t just go around throwing productivity into sentences, it is just completely baseless and biased observation on your own part - if you better enjoy a new workflow, but it is actually slower, you might still feel more “productive”.
GlenTheMachine 3y ago
I recently ran across helloSystem (https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/ https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/), which has as its hook the idea that we should base a unified desktop environment around the original Macintosh user interface guidelines. And while it's still pretty rough around the edges, it has FreeBSD underneath and I'm cautiously hopeful that it will turn into a useable desktop.
0x38B 3y ago
> Shortly thereafter my family gained access to broadband internet and I was able to delve into Linux again, this time thankfully without obliterating my computer's access to the outside world. As a teenager, my first experience with Linux (a Fedora book & CD combo) was formatting my main Windows drive with all my data on it. Good times.
et1337 3y ago
There’s no accounting for taste… I disagreed with just about every single preference the author expressed. Which challenges my normal wishful thinking, which is that somewhere out there is a perfect GUI that satisfies everyone’s needs.
vidarh 3y ago
I find it kind of funny that they see Mate and Caja as a good basis for something minimalist. I just transitioned off Caja to a homegrown "file manager" that is so basic it makes Caja seem like a swiss army knife. Largely because of all my virtual desktops only one uses floating windows, and don't need many features for it, but the features I care about I want to be able to tune exactly how I want them, and it was easier to write something from scratch than "fixing" Caja. And by "fixing" Caja I mean tuning the "spatial" aspects that it seems most desktop environments have lost interest in. On the minimalist side, we're all bikeshedding, and the biggest challenge is that there are more theories about what a nice interface should be like than there are users...
rtz121 3y ago
That's not a good background color. Very hard to read.
globular-toast 3y ago
I'm so lucky that I get to tinker with Linux, Emacs etc in my free time and then actually use those tools for work. It's like having a hobby car and then getting paid to drive it around. If you love tinkering with computers too then do avoid taking golden handcuffs tying you to a Windows job. It's just so much more fulfilling to make things that are actually useful.
nirui 3y ago
As a Gnome 40+ user for the past three years, and before that, XFCE and Awesome WM, based on my experience... NONE of these desktop/WM managed to resolve cluttering. Awesome WM gives you an organized clutter if you opened too many windows that's not bare-minimum terminals, while XFCE with all it's window UI elements made the clutter even worse (but you can just minimize the window). The new Gnome just made it so that opening more than three windows under the same workspace gives you nightmares due to lack of a dock as well as minimize buttons. (Now, to clarify, I had good experiences with all the desktop/wms mentioned above, so it's not a criticize, more of pointing out my desires) If you take a look at the screenshot presented in the article, I don't really think it's a productive desktop any more because it takes at least 5 seconds to find the window that you wanted. I mean, I'm sure MATE has tried it's best there, but... I think we are all limited by the lack of imagination of how a good desktop should be like. For me, I resolved my clutter problems by installing a Dock extension as well as (most importantly, actually) adding an external monitor. So finally I can comfortably open more than 6 windows at a time :) (Yep, I keep the tree windows that I wanted on the main monitor and throw the rest of clutters to the second one :)
errantmind 3y ago
> I even briefly used a tiling window manager before very quickly returning to the floating ones; the appeal of such utterly inflexible window management I will simply never understand. The author mentions this design in passing but I think it is contextually important to understand why people might like this at all so I'll share what I appreciate about tiling window managers: The appeal, for me, is the inflexibility. Tiling window managers and their often bundled 'tags' approach to window management offer a simplicity that is comforting in its constancy to me, the user. To sum it up, they make me feel 'at home' using my computer. Comfy goes beyond familiarity though. I never have a mess of windows to deal with across my monitors, where I'm constantly needing to look at a taskbar, minimizing and un-minimizing programs (or looking through a stack of 'shaded' windows in the author's case). Each of my frequently used programs has its own tag, or shares a tag (visually as a tile) with other programs. While the programs I have open at any one time change, their locations don't. Everything in its right place, I always know what is where. I switch between all programs directly with ease, with no intermediate interruptions to occupy my attention, my hands never leaving my keyboard. No 'looking' for stuff. Switches happen instantly because there are no transitions or any other forms of detectable latency (and for that matter, no compositor either). Combine all this with extensive use of scratchpads for ad-hoc and exploratory tasks and all the bases have been covered. Comfy.
- walteweiss 3y ago
  I remember I used Aston on Windows XP back in the day. All of my programs were assigned to their hot keys and I never left my keyboard. On top of that it ate less ram than a regular explorer.exe of Windows! A couple of decades later, I went through so many macOS versions, Windows 7,8,10 and different Gnome/KDE/Xfce etc., to find out just recently (well, a couple of years by now) that sway wm (or i3wm for X11) is a thing. What a relief! I’m back into old calm days with no eternal switching and multitasking that takes so much of my attention, giving nothing in return. God, I wish I knew about that much much earlier! When I left Windows for good, that was the only thing I missed so much! Now I enjoy that and 300 MB of occupied ram out of my 16 or 32 GB setups. Would highly recommend to any nerd like me!
- sph 3y ago
  Tiling is not great, but I believe is better than floating window managers. Yet neither are good enough in 2023. In floating systems, partially covered windows are useless and usually avoided: either you want to see everything, or you minimize the window. The few times one tries to actually keep a partially covered window (i.e. show only the last few lines of a terminal visible), the UX is terrible because as soon as you switch focus the visibility of the entire stack of windows changes, and you need to click around/Alt-Tab to restore the previous layout. For this reason, 99% of people just have a single window that's maximized per workspace. Tiling window managers could be decent if they were a core experience, but in reality no one develops apps for them so you always have some popup that spawns and fills half your screen. The major shortcoming of both is that they only work in rectangular, desktop-sized screens. Mobile UIs avoid both, and default to single-window-always-maximized, which still isn't good enough. Scrollable tiling managers, however, would be the bee's knees: windows are laid out on an infinitely scrollable horizontal layout, which would also easily replicate the common side-by-side layout "power users" often rely on. There are some niche experiments like PaperWM, but they haven't ironed out the UX for some reason: if they just made the entire layout scrollable by panning on your touchpad/mobile screen, it would instantly be better than anything we have today, and free us from the tyranny of window management. Additionally, it would work with both our widescreen, cinema-sized desktop monitors, and mobile devices. (I have never used it and memory might fail me, but I seem to remember Palm webOS devices had this scrollable "card" layout system which people seemed to like a lot. See https://www.palmtotal.com/sites/www.palmtotal.com/files/imagecache/nota/palm-webos-3.jpg https://www.palmtotal.com/sites/www.palmtotal.com/files/imag...)
mst 3y ago
> I have an infinite number of separate workspaces, each arranged in their own way. I like being able to see and have at-hand everything at once on one screen, which is an illusion best maintained, for me, by a single desktop. Even more than one monitor is more of an "immersion-breaker" than I care to mentally deal with. I feel exactly the same way but solve it by having an fvwm2 configuration that makes my workspace 3x3 (currently) of the physical screen size and I can scroll the viewport around that to taste. See https://trout.me.uk/X11/fvwm2rc https://trout.me.uk/X11/fvwm2rc for my configuration if curious (for a more actual-GUI-ish workflow you'd want to configure more of its features, I generally just have lots of xterms and maybe a firefox - see https://trout.me.uk/screenshot4.png https://trout.me.uk/screenshot4.png)
Wowfunhappy 3y ago
> An application launcher menu would simply be a folder you open like any other, containing launchers. Open the folder, size and shape it how you want, put it in whatever view style you want, and stick it somewhere on your screen. The author is not taking the metaphor far enough! He left out one of my favorite pieces of Mac OS. The folder should not contain application launchers. It should contain the actual applications themselves. An application is just a file. To "install" an application, copy the file to a location on your hard drive. To "uninstall" an application, delete the file. Under the hood, applications can be a collection of files, whatever, but the GUI should treat each application as one file.
- netdoll 3y ago
  It's not mentioned in the article, but the author uses AppImages for GUI applications wherever and whenever he can. He's very well aware of this aspect of the classic Mac OS and seeks to emulate it as closely as possible.

94 points by netdoll 3y ago

I think issues with attempts to redefine pc computing interfaces is that despite what is stated people are not actually starting from first principles when they go to redesign a personal computing GUI interface. Even in this article just a few sentences after stating we should start from first principles he then jumps into the assumption of the "desktop". The baggage of TTY interfaces in textual interfaces and the "desktop" paradigm for GUI interfaces is preventing people from going back to actual first principles for designing personal computing interfaces. Of course I do appreciate that since the title of the articles is minimalist desktop GUIs the assumption of "first principles of computing assuming a desktop analog" is baked into the article, I just think it's insufficient.

sim7c00 3y ago
so agree that a lot is not going back, perhaps more just modifying whats there. i think the first rule for me is: computers need to make things more simple for humans. how we control our devices, how we use those controls to do things (like interact with these guis), currentlt the model makes things always difficult and practically ensures people lose immersion of their real life into some device screen and controlscheme. tldr i guess; u can optimise guis etc. but if you dont change the interface to those guis its not reinventing anything. these things work in concert to generate the users experience.
rollcat 3y ago
> Even in this article just a few sentences after stating we should start from first principles he then jumps into the assumption of the "desktop". Agree. Although I can see how the idea of "first principles" can be a very difficult starting point. A blank sheet of paper is a scary monster. There's a huge breadth and depth of non-"desktop" GUIs out there, some (like smartphones) are even wildly successful. It's good to explore them for inspiration. Some of my favourites: - Arcan (https://arcan-fe.com/about/ https://arcan-fe.com/about/) - I won't attempt to summarize, just dive in! - SailfishOS (https://sailfishos.org/ https://sailfishos.org/) - mobile UI focused on interaction through gestures / swipes; I've used it as my daily driver for a couple years. - Speaking of mobiles, classic Nokia UIs allowed you to navigate to a specific item in the menu by pressing the corresponding digit on the dial pad. Once you learned where a particular item is, accessing e.g. your SMS inbox was extremely quick. - Apple Watch / WatchOS (https://www.apple.com/watchos/ https://www.apple.com/watchos/) - I've always loved the idea of a device where one of the primary interaction methods was a wheel/dial of some sort. The watch even gives you context-sensitive tactile feedback. - ZUIs in general (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_user_interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_user_interface) and the work of Jef Raskin in particular: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy_(software) - this is the guy who helped design the Macintosh, but his other work took a radically different route. - Magit (https://magit.vc/ https://magit.vc/). Many common git operations are reduced to a couple of keystrokes; the obscure features are more discoverable, and the cumbersome procedures (such as rebasing, or staging individual hunks) become simple and intuitive. Also check out transient (https://github.com/magit/transient https://github.com/magit/transient), which is the "UI toolkit" that powers Magit.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > non-"desktop" GUIs out there, some (like smartphones) are even wildly successful. Smartphone UIs are non-desktop metaphors? They sure seem like a desktop metaphor to me, albeit a very tiny desktop.
  - rollcat 3y ago
    A physical desktop is somewhere you lay out objects and organize work, and desktop GUIs have metaphors for that (windows, icons). A phone is more like a pocket notebook, a camera, a map/compass, etc. You can take it out of your pocket on the subway, in a park, on a date, or during a hike; you turn pages to find the information you need, point and shoot a photo, figure out where you are, write down a phone number, etc. There's very little in common with how you'd use a physical desktop, and early smartphones (pre-2007) that tried too hard to be like a desktop really, really sucked.
layer8 3y ago
There isn’t really a lot of alternatives to the "desktop", since it basically just means arranging stuff within a rectangle, and what else would you do on a rectangular screen? The only alternatives are having everything fullscreen, like TUIs, or else tiling windows, so that you never see the actual desktop. Similar for folders. You need a way to visually represent groupings of stuff, and there isn’t a lot of choice besides lists/menus or a two-dimensional layout of proxy items (usually labelled icons). I think we already found out what works best for monitor+mouse+keyboard 20-ish years ago. There's a lot to improve in terms of consistency and various details, but I don’t think there's any new paradigm to be found that would work better.

pengaru 3y ago

That's quite the wall of text I won't be reading...

MrVandemar 3y ago
Put it in reader-mode and up the line-height. Much improved.

bluepoint 3y ago

Cool insights in Desktop! I really hope that someone comes up with a desktop metaphor for the hundreds of open browser tabs (which I think are the new bookmarks) that hang open in an endless horizontal list. Imagine tabs which are like documents, can be moved around, minimized, and spatially organized in folders and subfolders. Actually, why does this not exist somehow?

somnic 3y ago
There's an extension for firefox called Tree Style Tabs. I never really got into it but some people are quite enthusiastic, pretty similar to what you describe though.
- bluepoint 3y ago
  This sounds interesting. I will check it out.
  - unicornporn 3y ago
    Even better: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sidebery/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sidebery/
pacifika 3y ago
Many people have thousands of bookmarks
vladxyz 3y ago
Also see something like this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/panorama-view/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/panorama-view...
ssnepenthe 3y ago
It may not be exactly what you have in mind but there is an interesting extension along similar lines (mostly for chrome) called TabFS that mounts your open tabs as a filesystem... https://omar.website/tabfs/ https://omar.website/tabfs/

torstenvl 3y ago

TLDR: How to hack MATE to get window shading and spatial file management à la MacOS 9. Decently cool and interesting, but not worth the hour-long read IMHO.

Animats 3y ago
I never got past the "get off my lawn" part. Try some 3D creation tools, such as Autodesk Fusion or Blender. Those face a really hard problem. It took too many years to get 3D CAD and drawing up to a tolerable level. Selection in a cluttered 3D environment took a long time to solve. Most user-level GUIs are addressing a far simpler problem. I'd just like to have borders back. They don't have to be big, or shadowed. Just present. I'm tired of overlapping borderless consoles in Ubuntu. Of web sites where there's a scrollable area with no border. Multiple scrollable areas with no border, as with Discord. Buttons with no indication of the live area. This stuff is borrowed from phones, but does not scale well to larger screens and more controls.

MrVandemar 3y ago

Interesting article, and the author makes some excellent points (especially about the pernicious encroachment of "touch" interfaces for systems that are fundamentally driven by keyboard and mouse on large screens) but they start with speculating about starting from scratch for desktop paradigms and ends up: > What I have now is a reasonable facsimile of the classic Mac OS UI functionality in Linux, minus little niceties like the aforementioned popup folders, and I've found that I need basically nothing beyond that to work incredibly efficiently. While it's one of the killer features of linux that you have enormous flexibility in how you use it and set it up, the screen-shot gives me the heebie-jeebies. Visually it's too noisy. I couldn't concentrate with that clutter screaming in my face. Nb: I'm a i3 + command-line guy.

colordrops 3y ago

Speaking of minimalist desktops, I'm really loving the unix-y philosophy behind sway/i3/hyprland/xmonad. Instead of an integrated desktop environment, you start with the simple window manager (Sway in my case), and pick and choose the tools you need for various things, such as a status bar, notifications, launcher, etc. Unless you really trick it out, there is usually very little on your screen other than the apps you are working with, as these window managers are primarly keyboard driven. Furthermore, I use the tiling functionality heavily. There are about 10 apps I use regularly, and they launch and get bound to a particular workspace on startup. My screen remains uncluttered, with one app filling the viewport, and a single keystroke to switch to the other apps I use. It's pretty close to perfect for my use cases. Lastly, these WMs are all configured through text files, so your exact configuration can be stored in dot files in git. In my case I use Nix, so I can redeploy my exact setup on any machine without any manual configuration.

bryceneal 3y ago
Interesting. I've been considering toying around with something similar using i3 and Nix. I hadn't considered binding certain applications to various workspaces, but I like that idea as well. I'm curious if there are any particular guides/examples you would recommend, or whether your Nix config is open source somewhere?
0x38B 3y ago
Sway is fast, minimal, and flexible. Their recommended tools/addons are worth a look: https://github.com/swaywm/sway/wiki/Useful-add-ons-for-sway https://github.com/swaywm/sway/wiki/Useful-add-ons-for-sway From that list I use greetd + tuigreet as my login manager, sway-launcher-desktop for FZF-powered app launching, and wob for lightweight brightness and volume display (send '50' to the wob socket and it'll show 50%; it doesn't get simpler).
globular-toast 3y ago
sway (and i3 at work as I'm forced to use X, although this pales in comparison to the author's dire situation) are perfect. I've written several simple text based blocks for i3blocks that makes my DE somehow more functional than the bloated ones. It's just so great getting exactly what you want because you write/compose it yourself (yes, I use emacs). Stumpwm is also very attractive. Less "Unixy" but more Lispy which is a different approach at getting exactly what you want.

Jedd 3y ago

> All computing up to the point of its [Apple Mac] introduction, at least from the "shell" standpoint of launching programs and managing files, was done exclusively through typing commands at the computer; you effectively had to program it, to a degree. The creators of the first Macintosh had the mouse, the desktop metaphor, and the menubar, and did their damnedest to make sure the user of their new paradigm-shifting computer ... The wording has some ambiguity, but it does sound like TFA hasn't heard of Xerox or Perq - perhaps attributing some misplaced invention, rather than popularisation, to Apple. Subsequently reinforced my suspicion: > The spirit of the Macintosh spread throughout all of computing; the GUI was inexorably the future. I think with desktop minimalism there's two broad interpretations - a desktop metaphor that is simple (has (frustratingly) few features), versus one that is complex but can be configured to be simple to operate. I like the fact I can very precisely adjust the width and colour of my window borders, but it's not a configuration item I visit more than once every few years, so I wouldn't say the option adds to the complexity of the interface. (Disclaimer - I've never used MATE.) > Oddly enough, only GNOME has had any kind of distinct vision The author did use KDE early on (version 3, but says they've only been using a computer for a decade and change). They're aware of other desktops, then, including the one that's arguably put the most effort into having a consistent user experience. The discussion on navigating through minimised windows I think boils down to a consideration of how to represent complexity - similarly their discussion of the launcher - almost inevitably a hierarchy is required if we are aiming to 'avoid the keyboard at all costs'. People have different GUI preferences there - mine is generally narrow and deep, over wide and shallow.

netdoll 3y ago
> The wording has some ambiguity, but it does sound like TFA hasn't heard of Xerox or Perq - perhaps attributing some misplaced invention, rather than popularisation, to Apple. The way I read it, they were attributing the intercombination of these elements under the desktop metaphor to Apple. Smalltalk existed, the Star existed, PERQ existed, the Lisp Machine GUIs existed and JERQ/Blit existed, but all of these were so substantially different from each other let alone what Apple did that they functionally exerted little influence on the way GUIs developed after the Macintosh launched save for a few odd branches here and there (Oberon anyone?)

BwackNinja 3y ago

MacOS 9 and the spatial desktop metaphor is neat. I went that route for a while. What this misses, however, is that the biggest problem with the desktop interface is that we've substantially increased application complexity and laptops (and even smaller devices) won. As a result, we're trying to answer the question "how we fit our skeuomorphic paradigm in a diminutive form factor". The inspiration involved much larger actual desks and tables where you can freely arrange several documents that are each visible and can be reached at a glance. If you're maximizing the window for a document for reasons beyond helping you focus, then your workspace ahem your screen is too small. The screenshot is 1920x1080. Screens are sold using buzzwords like 'HD', 'UHD', and 'retina' that evoke a sense of image clarity. I spent years telling my dad that I liked higher resolutions because it meant more /space/ and he couldn't grasp what I meant. He was stuck on associating higher resolution with clarity until I bought him a 43" 4k monitor, and he used it for a while. Even at 1.5x scaling, suddenly, he was able to view multiple pages of a document clearly at the same time without even scrolling. This isn't at all a normal desktop setup or the kind of setup that desktop environments are optimizing for or advocating. But it works better and better matches the inspiration.

alwayslikethis 3y ago
For many people, the limiting factor of this is visual acuity though. I personally can't see it useful to have more than 2560x1440 equivalent pixels of space on a 27 inch monitor. For a larger monitor, you have to sit further back, so it is effectively the same. If you want to see more clearly, you'd need to get closer, but that causes issues since you are still limited by your available field of view.
- shric 3y ago
  I'd probably agree with the "useful" but I find higher resolution more aesthetically pleasing, especially text.
  - netdoll 3y ago
    Conversely, I find anything above 1920x1080 very displeasing precisely because it removes my ability to practically use bitmapped fonts. Subpixel antialiasing is very distracting and Retina (IMHO) is a solution in search of a problem when it comes to making user interfaces that are actually aesthetic and easy on the eyes. I'm autistic and have diagnosed vision problems tho, so that probably feeds into it for better or worse.

Avshalom 3y ago

It's a shame that rox filer is functionally dead and the rox desktop ecosystem (small as it was) is even dead-er I think author would have enjoyed it.

netdoll 3y ago
ROX is one of those things which is great except for the ecosystem it tied itself to. I would love to see a Wayland rewrite one day, or something using the same concepts. Or really anything that isn't r/unixporn tile rice #9001
- sillywalk 3y ago
  You can run RiscOS on a Raspberry Pi. It's what's rox is based on I believe. RiscOS is quite nice to use, but it is .. limited. No wifi for instance. And the filesystem uses . (dots) for folder separators, so xfering files can be a pain.

bstar77 3y ago

Two years ago, I transitioned to a minimalist tiling window manager (WM) despite my initial reservations about them. This change was prompted by my desire to experiment with high-end hardware and a 4K multi-monitor setup in a tiled environment. Surprisingly, the switch turned out to be a game-changer, boosting my productivity significantly, with around 90% of my tasks now occurring in the terminal. Traditional criticisms of terminals, such as memorization challenges and lack of guidance, no longer apply, thanks to modern features like auto-completion, interactive history, suggestions, and plugins like Git integration. Unfortunately, the reluctance to embrace this minimalist, terminal-centric approach may hinder power users from unlocking its full potential due to long-standing biases and a fear of change.

Skyywalker 3y ago
Which terminal app do you use? It sounds like one I would like to try. Thank you.
- netdoll 3y ago
  I believe most of the things OP mentioned have to do with the shell and not the terminal. At the very least, most of the things thus mentioned can be configured in zsh (I don't know how, as I haven't looked into it really)
- bstar77 3y ago
  This is what my desktop looks like: https://i.imgur.com/Mo9ku4W.png https://i.imgur.com/Mo9ku4W.png https://i.imgur.com/pq3fwBk.png https://i.imgur.com/pq3fwBk.png I use Kitty for my terminal, i3 for my window manager, vifm for my file manager, vim/neovim for my editor and Firefox. All of my virtual desktops handle different things, like watching movies, doing AI projects, web work, game development, graphics work, etc. You can do all of this stuff in Windows or on a Mac, but I'm using minimal resources with a highly streamlined workflow. Everything that I can script, I script. I also use Zsh with quite a few plugins so the terminal itself isn't so important. I use Kitty because it's fast, can render graphics, is well documented and has a ton of features.
3y ago

40yearoldman 3y ago

Minimal desktops are productivity boosters. On top of that ones that can be controlled by keyboard input are super important. 99% of the time you just want information. Text. The chrome does not matter. Yet modern desktops and web pages make humans hunt and pick through poorly designed interfaces to get the info we need. I use EXWM. It’s a time saver. I have no desktop because I am either using the full screen for a single application or flip flopping between a few apps that share the entire screen. This means every pixel of the screen is used and not wasted on useless images of empty fields. In top of that I am able to designate windows and frames for specific jobs or functions, always able to recall the last terminal or most relevance. We fucked up with movable windows. They are inefficient complicated and bring little value over a simple list of activities to switch between.

jwells89 3y ago
I believe this is kind of thing is highly subjective as well as dependent on hardware. Point in case fullscreening anything but an IDE or graphics editor on a 27"+ monitor drives me crazy because most things don't make good use of the extra space. Similarly I find tiled smaller windows irritating because they often size themselves incorrectly, ironically making for more manual window twiddling and micromanagement than I'd be doing with a boring old floating window manager.
- 40yearoldman 3y ago
  Tiling -- split left and right or up and down... This is the case within in Emacs. Given I use a much larger screen I can assure you it works well.
kaba0 3y ago
> just want information. Text Text is a not an information-dense medium, and for many kind of data it simply sucks. Also, please don’t just go around throwing productivity into sentences, it is just completely baseless and biased observation on your own part - if you better enjoy a new workflow, but it is actually slower, you might still feel more “productive”.

GlenTheMachine 3y ago

I recently ran across helloSystem (https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/ https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/), which has as its hook the idea that we should base a unified desktop environment around the original Macintosh user interface guidelines. And while it's still pretty rough around the edges, it has FreeBSD underneath and I'm cautiously hopeful that it will turn into a useable desktop.

0x38B 3y ago

> Shortly thereafter my family gained access to broadband internet and I was able to delve into Linux again, this time thankfully without obliterating my computer's access to the outside world. As a teenager, my first experience with Linux (a Fedora book & CD combo) was formatting my main Windows drive with all my data on it. Good times.

et1337 3y ago

There’s no accounting for taste… I disagreed with just about every single preference the author expressed. Which challenges my normal wishful thinking, which is that somewhere out there is a perfect GUI that satisfies everyone’s needs.

vidarh 3y ago

I find it kind of funny that they see Mate and Caja as a good basis for something minimalist. I just transitioned off Caja to a homegrown "file manager" that is so basic it makes Caja seem like a swiss army knife. Largely because of all my virtual desktops only one uses floating windows, and don't need many features for it, but the features I care about I want to be able to tune exactly how I want them, and it was easier to write something from scratch than "fixing" Caja. And by "fixing" Caja I mean tuning the "spatial" aspects that it seems most desktop environments have lost interest in. On the minimalist side, we're all bikeshedding, and the biggest challenge is that there are more theories about what a nice interface should be like than there are users...

rtz121 3y ago

That's not a good background color. Very hard to read.

globular-toast 3y ago

I'm so lucky that I get to tinker with Linux, Emacs etc in my free time and then actually use those tools for work. It's like having a hobby car and then getting paid to drive it around. If you love tinkering with computers too then do avoid taking golden handcuffs tying you to a Windows job. It's just so much more fulfilling to make things that are actually useful.

nirui 3y ago

As a Gnome 40+ user for the past three years, and before that, XFCE and Awesome WM, based on my experience... NONE of these desktop/WM managed to resolve cluttering. Awesome WM gives you an organized clutter if you opened too many windows that's not bare-minimum terminals, while XFCE with all it's window UI elements made the clutter even worse (but you can just minimize the window). The new Gnome just made it so that opening more than three windows under the same workspace gives you nightmares due to lack of a dock as well as minimize buttons. (Now, to clarify, I had good experiences with all the desktop/wms mentioned above, so it's not a criticize, more of pointing out my desires) If you take a look at the screenshot presented in the article, I don't really think it's a productive desktop any more because it takes at least 5 seconds to find the window that you wanted. I mean, I'm sure MATE has tried it's best there, but... I think we are all limited by the lack of imagination of how a good desktop should be like. For me, I resolved my clutter problems by installing a Dock extension as well as (most importantly, actually) adding an external monitor. So finally I can comfortably open more than 6 windows at a time :) (Yep, I keep the tree windows that I wanted on the main monitor and throw the rest of clutters to the second one :)

errantmind 3y ago

> I even briefly used a tiling window manager before very quickly returning to the floating ones; the appeal of such utterly inflexible window management I will simply never understand. The author mentions this design in passing but I think it is contextually important to understand why people might like this at all so I'll share what I appreciate about tiling window managers: The appeal, for me, is the inflexibility. Tiling window managers and their often bundled 'tags' approach to window management offer a simplicity that is comforting in its constancy to me, the user. To sum it up, they make me feel 'at home' using my computer. Comfy goes beyond familiarity though. I never have a mess of windows to deal with across my monitors, where I'm constantly needing to look at a taskbar, minimizing and un-minimizing programs (or looking through a stack of 'shaded' windows in the author's case). Each of my frequently used programs has its own tag, or shares a tag (visually as a tile) with other programs. While the programs I have open at any one time change, their locations don't. Everything in its right place, I always know what is where. I switch between all programs directly with ease, with no intermediate interruptions to occupy my attention, my hands never leaving my keyboard. No 'looking' for stuff. Switches happen instantly because there are no transitions or any other forms of detectable latency (and for that matter, no compositor either). Combine all this with extensive use of scratchpads for ad-hoc and exploratory tasks and all the bases have been covered. Comfy.

walteweiss 3y ago
I remember I used Aston on Windows XP back in the day. All of my programs were assigned to their hot keys and I never left my keyboard. On top of that it ate less ram than a regular explorer.exe of Windows! A couple of decades later, I went through so many macOS versions, Windows 7,8,10 and different Gnome/KDE/Xfce etc., to find out just recently (well, a couple of years by now) that sway wm (or i3wm for X11) is a thing. What a relief! I’m back into old calm days with no eternal switching and multitasking that takes so much of my attention, giving nothing in return. God, I wish I knew about that much much earlier! When I left Windows for good, that was the only thing I missed so much! Now I enjoy that and 300 MB of occupied ram out of my 16 or 32 GB setups. Would highly recommend to any nerd like me!
sph 3y ago
Tiling is not great, but I believe is better than floating window managers. Yet neither are good enough in 2023. In floating systems, partially covered windows are useless and usually avoided: either you want to see everything, or you minimize the window. The few times one tries to actually keep a partially covered window (i.e. show only the last few lines of a terminal visible), the UX is terrible because as soon as you switch focus the visibility of the entire stack of windows changes, and you need to click around/Alt-Tab to restore the previous layout. For this reason, 99% of people just have a single window that's maximized per workspace. Tiling window managers could be decent if they were a core experience, but in reality no one develops apps for them so you always have some popup that spawns and fills half your screen. The major shortcoming of both is that they only work in rectangular, desktop-sized screens. Mobile UIs avoid both, and default to single-window-always-maximized, which still isn't good enough. Scrollable tiling managers, however, would be the bee's knees: windows are laid out on an infinitely scrollable horizontal layout, which would also easily replicate the common side-by-side layout "power users" often rely on. There are some niche experiments like PaperWM, but they haven't ironed out the UX for some reason: if they just made the entire layout scrollable by panning on your touchpad/mobile screen, it would instantly be better than anything we have today, and free us from the tyranny of window management. Additionally, it would work with both our widescreen, cinema-sized desktop monitors, and mobile devices. (I have never used it and memory might fail me, but I seem to remember Palm webOS devices had this scrollable "card" layout system which people seemed to like a lot. See https://www.palmtotal.com/sites/www.palmtotal.com/files/imagecache/nota/palm-webos-3.jpg https://www.palmtotal.com/sites/www.palmtotal.com/files/imag...)

mst 3y ago

> I have an infinite number of separate workspaces, each arranged in their own way. I like being able to see and have at-hand everything at once on one screen, which is an illusion best maintained, for me, by a single desktop. Even more than one monitor is more of an "immersion-breaker" than I care to mentally deal with. I feel exactly the same way but solve it by having an fvwm2 configuration that makes my workspace 3x3 (currently) of the physical screen size and I can scroll the viewport around that to taste. See https://trout.me.uk/X11/fvwm2rc https://trout.me.uk/X11/fvwm2rc for my configuration if curious (for a more actual-GUI-ish workflow you'd want to configure more of its features, I generally just have lots of xterms and maybe a firefox - see https://trout.me.uk/screenshot4.png https://trout.me.uk/screenshot4.png)

Wowfunhappy 3y ago

> An application launcher menu would simply be a folder you open like any other, containing launchers. Open the folder, size and shape it how you want, put it in whatever view style you want, and stick it somewhere on your screen. The author is not taking the metaphor far enough! He left out one of my favorite pieces of Mac OS. The folder should not contain application launchers. It should contain the actual applications themselves. An application is just a file. To "install" an application, copy the file to a location on your hard drive. To "uninstall" an application, delete the file. Under the hood, applications can be a collection of files, whatever, but the GUI should treat each application as one file.

netdoll 3y ago
It's not mentioned in the article, but the author uses AppImages for GUI applications wherever and whenever he can. He's very well aware of this aspect of the classic Mac OS and seeks to emulate it as closely as possible.