In the end, using any device is all about doing actions (the simplest being reading/viewing, but also editing etc.) on data. Now the biggest difference between desktop and mobile is that the first one is (was?) file oriented while the second one is software (application) oriented.
Edit a document, listen to a music, on desktop you would historically navigate to where the file is, then open it with the program of your choice. On mobile, you would almost never do that, you would first open the app and from it select the file you want to interact with.
This is changing a lot how you are organizing the way you work. On desktop, it is easy to put related files of different types in the same folder, for example you organize your birthday, you can have the list of the invited people in a excel file with their number, a subfolder with the songs you want to play, some pictures of the venue, a text files with notes and etc. It is not natural at all to organize things like that on mobile. Android and iOS are hiding the files as much as they can. (This is not the case on Ubuntu Touch for example). And it becomes the responsibility of the app to organize the files it can open. This has a big impact on what you expect your desktop manager to done or not. I would personally be very happy if I could organize applications how we can organize files, and simply reopen a work session where I left it (some PDF open, some terminals open, my IDE, my browser...) even weeks after.
To complexify the topic even more, the same thinking can be done in the browser, which is basically an OS now...
>Now the biggest difference between desktop and mobile is that the first one is (was?) file oriented while the second one is software (application) oriented.
Is this really a meaningful distinction or just your preference? I find myself reaching for a file manager on desktop a lot less than 30 years ago, because when a file structure is necessary it's nearly always handled by a specialized app, and I don't need that many advanced file management features anymore (example: RAW + sidecars are handled by my RAW app itself, not my file manager, because both are useless without each other). Software development is an obvious exception and power user configuration is an unnecessary exception.
>This is changing a lot how you are organizing the way you work. On desktop, it is easy to put related files of different types in the same folder, for example you organize your birthday, you can have the list of the invited people in a excel file with their number, a subfolder with the songs you want to play, some pictures of the venue, a text files with notes and etc. It is not natural at all to organize things like that on mobile.
Then it seems you're talking about a more fundamental distinction which is "flat collections filterable/searchable by metadata" vs "hierarchical trees with a mnemonic structure" to organize entities. Not about files vs non-files. But again I use both on desktop and mobile without problems (simple example: Obsidian has a tree, media catalogues are typically either flat collections or hybrid).
UI in general, let alone UX, is a much wider concept than that single difference.
flaburgan · · focus · HN ↗
orbital-decay · · focus · HN ↗
Is this really a meaningful distinction or just your preference? I find myself reaching for a file manager on desktop a lot less than 30 years ago, because when a file structure is necessary it's nearly always handled by a specialized app, and I don't need that many advanced file management features anymore (example: RAW + sidecars are handled by my RAW app itself, not my file manager, because both are useless without each other). Software development is an obvious exception and power user configuration is an unnecessary exception.
>This is changing a lot how you are organizing the way you work. On desktop, it is easy to put related files of different types in the same folder, for example you organize your birthday, you can have the list of the invited people in a excel file with their number, a subfolder with the songs you want to play, some pictures of the venue, a text files with notes and etc. It is not natural at all to organize things like that on mobile.
Then it seems you're talking about a more fundamental distinction which is "flat collections filterable/searchable by metadata" vs "hierarchical trees with a mnemonic structure" to organize entities. Not about files vs non-files. But again I use both on desktop and mobile without problems (simple example: Obsidian has a tree, media catalogues are typically either flat collections or hybrid).
UI in general, let alone UX, is a much wider concept than that single difference.