> The final, particularly strong, objection from the tech community is "don't touch my stuff". People get angry when they have worked hard to get their desktop environment just as they like it and something changes to disrupt that.
Yeah, this can be a little extreme, and I feel we can benefit from being a little more open to trying new things.
The part about designing specifically for large displays and widescreen monitors was interesting. We can also reverse it, though: right now I'm away from home, and I only have this old laptop which is mostly great but has a shitty touchpad as the mouse, and I have to think this must be really common. However, this situation seems to be completely ignored by all desktop UX design. We seem to be pretty good at coming up with ways to use the mouse in our programs, but when the mouse is hard to control and unreliable, it causes pain. I guess I can use ratpoison or something, but that seems to be giving up too much.
Regarding the AI going deep into the filesystem and organizing my data...I'm extremely skeptical of inserting any kind of inherent unpredictability into how I interact with the computer. Giving a command or input should produce a well-defined and predictable (in principle) action. Getting rid of that paradigm fundamentally changes the relationship between the user and the computer in a way that, in my opinion at least, greatly diminishes its usefulness as a tool.
I think the big issue is that the user doesn't have a choice in many cases. Windows obviously doesn't give the user a choice, they made the start menu much shittier and you had to live with it or go away. Popular distributions like Ubuntu also focus on one desktop environment, and it's often not easy to switch (it's possible of course, but at least when I tried it a long time ago just installing a different desktop wasn't enough).
Making it easier to choose allows for much more experimentation. I'm using Niri right now, which certainly isn't something you can just give users as a default.
WCSTombs · · focus · HN ↗
Yeah, this can be a little extreme, and I feel we can benefit from being a little more open to trying new things.
The part about designing specifically for large displays and widescreen monitors was interesting. We can also reverse it, though: right now I'm away from home, and I only have this old laptop which is mostly great but has a shitty touchpad as the mouse, and I have to think this must be really common. However, this situation seems to be completely ignored by all desktop UX design. We seem to be pretty good at coming up with ways to use the mouse in our programs, but when the mouse is hard to control and unreliable, it causes pain. I guess I can use ratpoison or something, but that seems to be giving up too much.
Regarding the AI going deep into the filesystem and organizing my data...I'm extremely skeptical of inserting any kind of inherent unpredictability into how I interact with the computer. Giving a command or input should produce a well-defined and predictable (in principle) action. Getting rid of that paradigm fundamentally changes the relationship between the user and the computer in a way that, in my opinion at least, greatly diminishes its usefulness as a tool.
fabian2k · · focus · HN ↗
Making it easier to choose allows for much more experimentation. I'm using Niri right now, which certainly isn't something you can just give users as a default.
eviks · · focus · HN ↗
That's obviously wrong, you could install an alternative start menu and stay where you are