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Ask Slashdot: Are Linux Desktop Users More Pragmatic Now Or Is It Inertia?
David W. White writes "Years ago ago those of us who used any *nix desktop ('every morning when you wake up, the house is a little different') were seen as willing to embrace change and spend hours tinkering and configuring until we got new desktop versions to work the way we wanted, while there was an opposite perception of desktop users over in the Mac world ('it just works') and the Windows world ('it's a familiar interface'). However, a recent article in Datamation concludes that 'for better or worse, [Linux desktop users] know what they want — a classic desktop — and the figures consistently show that is what they are choosing in far greater numbers than GNOME, KDE, or any other single graphical interface.' Has the profile of the Linux desktop user changed to a more pragmatic one? Or is it just the psychology of user inertia at work, when one considers the revolt against changes in the KDE, GNOME, UNITY and Windows 8 interfaces in recent times?"
What is a "Classic Desktop" and in what way are the other GUIs being discussed not "Classic Desktops"?
Would be funny to have a "Score: --1" for your post.
Linux users just haven't fell victim to the mass hysteria of solving a problem, which never existed. Apple designed an appealing desktop, and as their market share increased, Microsoft began throwing UI designs against the wall. Then people started buying phones and tablets, so designers decided no one wanted a functional desktop anymore. Gnome 3 decided to screw everything up, then Ubuntu decided they wanted everything screwed up in a different way. KDE made the same traditional desktop demand more resources, making it unusable.
Everything has to do with productivity. Sure we all like a bit of novelty and it's fun to tinker with new features of a desktop or user interface, but the majority of these innovations are never used (if the user has the choice), but the recent Linux desktops (Gnome mostly) have forced a new set of heuristics on a user base that increasingly uses Linux for productivity and not just tinkering.
It's a waste of time to have to learn a new way of doing everything when the existing ways work already. That is why 'classic desktop' is favored. It works, and although new things might work, they have not proven to work better.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
I don't see it as a "revolt against change" but a revolt to changes for the sake of change (enter gnome 3 and windows 8 as exhibit A and B).
I'd like to have something like the Win 7 Start Menu, but XFCE with the Panel on the bottom is (a) Good Enough, and (b) easy on the brain, since I frequently switch between my Linux box and the company's Windows 7 Enterprise laptop that sits right next to it.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
If you can't have a consistent experience across even one day, why get too reliant on customizations and shortcuts?
Back in the day, I had to switch between Data General (terminals), MacOS, and Amiga keyboards and UIs on a daily basis between work and home. These days, of course, everything has changed - now I bounce from Linux to Android to OSX, and more than occasionally Windows too. It's just never paid off to build a super-custom setup when you can't stick with it.
I use Linux for my main desktop at home partly because it is so quick and easy to reinstall - just keep your data on a backed-up server and you can virtually forget about maintenance or troubleshooting. Get used to the default setup and just reinstall whenever you run into something you can't work around - 15 minutes to get back to a familiar desktop is quicker than any full restore-from-backup I'm aware of. (I actually like Linux internals but every time I learn something, I end up forgetting it before I need it a second time; it gets frustrating...)
I'm aware I'm giving up a fair amount of potential productivity and convenience. I don't care any more. I'm just happy when I remember not to try and touch the monitor on my wife's iMac.
I got friends and colleagues who, for example, use Dvorak. More power to 'em. They're younger and more stubborn than I, and most of the time they have one laptop they use both at home and at work. As a wise man once remarked, I'm older now, I got to move my car on street-sweeping day, I can't be doing just anything I want any more...
Perfectly Normal Industries
I'd say it has less to do with any change in user tastes and more to do with the apparent move from a situation where the present state of interfaces is bad; but improving (which, fairly obviously, creates enthusiasm for new stuff) to a situation where most of the improvements have been mined out; but there are still UI designers around, so they've just been changing random things in some horrible mockery of genetic drift.
When version N+1 was probably an improvement, getting motivated to go poke it until it works was easier. Now version N+1 may have some cool new feature; but it'll probably have 8 regressions, the pointless removal of something you liked, and probably tentacles. Why bother?
"Pragmatism" versus "Inertia"? What a strange choice that doesn't align with pro/con argumentation.
FWIW, let's look at a continuum of Linux/Unix desktop users instead. We know that a core group will tend to prefer a minimalist X-Windows desktop such as IceWM for the least impact on hardware performance. Many users prefer desktops like XFCE, Razor-QT, LXDM, and others that offer lightweight but fuller and more integrated experiences than the truly minimalist ones, acknowledging that the load on a system tends to increase as more features are included and deciding strategically to suit their usefulness-efficiency preferences. At the other end of the spectrum are those users who want an entire desktop environment in which all the bells and whistles are integrated into a particular look and feel, as characterized by KDE and Gnome, but understandably with a heavier load on the underlying hardware. So, I suppose pragmatism enters into such choices. To each their own, and having such choices is wonderful. Inertia? There are those who will say "I use KDE because I learned on it and I'm used to it", but this also is a pragmatic choice and not one of "inertia".
I deny that I have not avoided attaining the opposite of that which I do not want.
GNOME: the desktop that COULD be awesome, if only the dev team actually cared about performance, polish and a reasonable feature-set. Overall this desktop has the best feel and most potential, but sadly it is never quite realised.
KDE: at first this desktop seems powerful and feature-rich, but after a week of using it you realise how little its devs care about usability and sane defaults. Not everybody wants to make a career out of tweaking their desktop.
Unity: has SOME nice usability aspects, but it is only properly supported on Ubuntu, and Ubuntu is an extremely buggy OS.
Xfce: fine for very basic use, but lack of proper OS integration (like GNOME) and some annoying bugs make this desktop unusable.
LXDE: almost total lack of OS integration. It's more like a collection of recommended packages for a minimal X desktop than an actual DE.
Cinnamon: GNOME done badly. Sure, you get your somewhat classic launcher and panel, but it just feels clunky compared to Windows, GNOME or Unity.
MATE: what can one say about MATE? It does the job and GNOME 2 was great in its time, but the desktop is starting to show its age. Probably the sanest choice for getting real work done, but not as satisfying as more modern desktops.
Summary: if GNOME would stop reshuffling the deck chairs and spend a few releases on performance, polish and features real-world people care about, they could easily become the most popular desktop. They've done 99% of the work, but for some reason are blind to that crucial last 1%. Given that this is probably never going to change, the Linux desktop is pretty much an exercise in futility and inefficiency.
Whenever I leave my [former-]chomebook in the bathroom when I take a shower & everything's still running right except for the mouse, I can get by until the next reboot without using it. IMO, that's a clean interface. That said, out of the box you already pretty much require unity-tweak to fix all the shit they got wrong. The opacity settings, the workspace layout, etc....
I just (five days ago) spent two days huddled with a half dozen other developers in the corner of a large conference room filled with IT people in Chicago. We were testing our various implementations of a new protocol that we expect to see in wide use during the next two years.
I had brought a brand new laptop, for various unfortunate reasons, on which I had just installed the complete stack of software I needed night before in the hotel room. I put Ubuntu 13.1 on it because I happened to have that particular distro on a flash drive that was at hand just then and I was in a hurry.
Things worked out. The laptop worked well and I got my part done. Thing is, I spent that rather intense period of time using Unity. For development and testing of software. Really.
I get it. Unity is fast and effective, particularly on the limited real-estate of a laptop screen where you end up switching rapidly among full screen applications.
I've avoided Unity like the plague on desktop hardware were I have multiple, large displays, and I think I'll continue doing that. However on a laptop that is not running external displays Unity works pretty well. You can navigate quickly with mouse or keyboard and avoid fussing with things. The fixed position of the large icons (although too large by default) on the sidebar is particularly useful.
So, bust out the fangs and hate me down with your mod points; I found a use for Unity and said so on Slashdot.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
I always end up going back to a customized XFCE, but about every 6 months, I decide to try something else, and usually end up wiping my system and reinstalling before I'm done.
My wife has a mildly customized XFCE setup, and she loves it. It almost never gets changed or tweaked.
using too many words. He means that users of personal computers (as opposed to mobile devices) want simply a "desktop."
As in, the metaphor—the one that has driven PC UI/UX for decades now.
The metaphor behind the desktop UI/UX was that a "real desktop" had:
- A single surface of limited space
- Onto which one could place, or remove files
- And folders
- And rearrange them at will in ways that served as memory and reasoning aides
- With the option to discard them (throw them in the trash) once they were no longer needed on the single, bounded surface
Both of the "traditional breaking" releases from KDE and GNOME did violence to this metaphor; a screen no longer behaved—at least in symbolic ways—like the surface of a desk. The mental shortcuts that could draw conclusions about properties, affordances, and behavior based on a juxtaposition with real-world objects broke down.
Instead of "this is meant to be a desktop, so it's a limited, rectangular space on which I can put, stack, and arrange my stuff and where much of my workday will 'happen'" gave way to "this is obviously a work area of some kind, but it doesn't behave in ways that metaphorically echo a desk—but I don't have any basis on which to make suppositions about how it *does* behave, or what affordances/capabilities or constraints it offers, what sorts of 'objects' populate it, what their properties are,' and so on.
I think that's the biggest problem—the desktop metaphor was done away with, but no alternative metaphor took its place—no obvious mental shortcuts were on offer to imply how things worked enough to allow users to infer the rest. People have argued that the problem was that the new releases were too "phone like," but that's actually not true. The original iPhone, radical though it was, operated on a clear metaphor aided by its physical size and shape: that of a phone—buttons laid out in a grid, a single-task/single-thread use model, and very abbreviated, single-option tasks/threads (i.e. 'apps' that performed a single function, rather than 'software' with many menus and options for UX flow).
Though the iPhone on its surface was a radical anti-phone, in practice, the use experience was very much like a phone: power on, address grid of buttons, perform single task with relatively low flow-open-endedness, power off and set down when complete. KDE4/GNOME3 did not behave this way. They retained the open-endedness, large screen area, feature-heavy, and "dwelling" properties of desktops (it is a space where you spend time, not an object used to perform a single task and then 'end' that task) so the phone metaphor does not apply. But they also removed most of the considered representations, enablements, and constraints that could easily be metaphorically associated with a desktop.
The result was that you constantly had to look stuff up—even if you were an experienced computer user. They reintroduced *precisely* the problem that the desktop metaphor had solved decades earlier—the reason, in fact, that it was created in the first place. It was dumb.
That's what he means by "classic desktop." "Linux users want a desktop, not something else that remains largely unspecified or that must instead be enumerated for users on a feature-by-feature basis with no particular organizing cultural model."
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Actually it is more political than you imagine.
KDE was not pure (L)GPL, it had dual licencing for money etc. It was the biggest FUD ever pulled successfully, even Microsoft failed to do something in this scale.
All of this is now over 10y ago but that's what really created the GNOME project. And they won't be finished until all functionality of KDE is completely removed from your desktop, leaving you with a single mouse pointer, single mouse button and a single window, full screen.
All those other guys can keep their all-encompassing UI vision. I don't want their kool-aid. I'm glad I get a choice in Linux. I may have to occasionally beat my head on the computer for days at a time when something stops working, but at least I can avoid having some corporate assholes or desktop environment programmers who like the smell of their own farts ramming their bullshit down my throat.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I think it has a lot to do with when you came up. When I came up with computers in the 1980s and 1990s we had hard problems and solved them. It was a world of rapidly growing IT spending, with IT taking on more and more tasks. After Y2K the technology sector began to get very conservative, the focus was on cost cutting and reliability. Far more like the world of the late 70s and early 80s in Mainframe and Minis that the PCs had replaced. What's exciting now is that mobile devices have brought back that enthusiasm for change and excitement again. They haven't caught up with desktops but at least they are creating a generation of developers who are used to a market that grows and expands rather than stays put at minimal cost.
I watch the threads on any kinds of change whether it be ubiquitous computing (Windows 8), IPv6 (networking), Wayland, the new hardware designs... and there is a pervasive pessimism among younger IT, a terrible can't do attitude.
Back in the 1990s when Linux was coming up we had sorta GUIs die: FVWM, AfterStep, SawFish, AMI-wm, Openlook (olwm), blackbox... Systems grow change and die leaving behind better ones. What's terrible is that the new generation wants stagnation. Either Gnome 3 succeeds or it doesn't. But regardless of what happens the work on Gnome advances the ecosystem.
good for you. To answer the question though I think it's psychology of efficiency. If the tools aren't efficient for the brain to categorize/understand it's not practical as an interface (desktop or otherwise). The problem with Metro isn't that it's different, it's that it's too much visual clutter for the brain to process quickly. This is reflected in GNOME/KDE in that, while neatly organized, it relies on memory association of images to functions. Icons are everywhere these days so those associations aren't as strong or that part of the memory is overloaded to access efficiently. Non-graphical interfaces suffer from something similar in the ability to remember all the commands and their associated flags.
The classic desktop organizes things in groupings, lists, etc and while there's icons associated the overriding organization of alphabetical text gives shortcuts for the brain to compartmentalize information where it can or to simply analyze because all the information is there (where KDE/etc you must hover to get all the info one icon at a time)
The more I look at the whole changes in OS-UIs lately, the more I get the impression that the whole cross-platform thing got lost it's grip to reality.
Sure I like my tablet, my smartphone, my laptop,... and I live with the smudged display I have on my tablet and my smartphone, since the do not really bother me. Probably because I can easily overlook these smudges, but since I can't overlook them on my normal monitor (or laptop display; or my glasses for that matter), I'm no friend of UIs which seem to be designed for tablets&smartphones but get presented to my as 'new' and 'easy' interfaces for my normal displays.
I like the idea of having one back-end, but I also like different frontends for different tools.
-> I get that some designers like their tablets and think that one UI should rule them all, but I don't agree with it.
My car has four wheels. Works best at the moment.
ftfy
what about if a car came along that didn't have wheels? would you not buy it simply because it didn't have wheels?
wheels on cars only works best because you haven't experienced anything better... but that doesn't mean that wheels will always work best.
change for the sake of change sucks, but innovation stems from change and innovation can also lead to change for the better.
Actually it is more political than you imagine. KDE was not pure (L)GPL, it had dual licencing for money etc. It was the biggest FUD ever pulled successfully, even Microsoft failed to do something in this scale.
And here, you make the mistake most FOSS advocates make - You actually believe (or at least, "care about") what you just said.
I like open source. I use open source. I've rolled my own kernels, I've even modified them to fix an early broken multi-PCI bus enumeration routine. And yet...
I don't give the least fuck about the "purity" of your license. I'll pirate Windows if it works better than Gnome, for all I care, though of course I (and most people) would far, far prefer to stay legal. So if KDE has only a hint of "IP" taint, vs the abomination that we call "Gnome", hey, y'know, KDE does what I want better, so I use it.
And that last point doesn't just apply to Linux. Microsoft would do well to learn it themselves - I don't care in the least about price or legality or what "other" platforms it works well on... I just care that my desktop OS behaves like I expect, and lets me do what I want to do.
What i'd like is a terminal with an integrated visual file browser.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
In the past(late 90s early 2000s) the various machines that I had barely worked. So I noodled and fiddled until the machine was just the way I liked it. But then at some point, I largely stopped. Basically the machines were powerful enough that tweaking didn't buy me any critical functionality or performance to make it worth my time. Also the defaults for almost any OS are close enough that my total "tweaking" might take 5 minutes or less from a default configuration.
In many ways I think that it less that we don't tweak as the machines are coming pre-tweaked.
Obviously this is not for everyone as we all know those people who must spend a full day getting a new machine just the way they like it.
But if I had a new machine built from scratch tomorrow I would say that 50 percent of the few minutes of tweaking would be spent changing the IDE defaults for a few keys and whatnot. The bulk of the rest would be eliminating stupid default icons and putting up a few that I frequently use (Terminal, etc)
I just spun up a raspberry pi and with the arduino IDE sitting right on the desktop I'm not sure that I'll make a single change at this point. Any changes going forward will be 100% in support of critical functionality.
Norton Commander...
Oh, they have the internet on computers now
After 20 years of experimentation, the conclusion is that the desktop metaphor is probably too complex for the average user. Power users appreciate floating windows, file hierarchies, multiple screens, notification bars, hierarchal menus etc. Meanwhile the more typical user maximizes one window at a time, clicks icons, and saves everything in the same place. The "phone/tablet" model is much closer to the average person's mental map of how a computer should work.
The problem is that Linux users are 'power users' almost by definition so KDE/Gnome were terrible places to experiment with replacing the desktop metaphor.
GNU Midnight Commander.
I've been a Gnome user since around 2001, to say things were pretty rough back then is an understatement... In 2012 I switched to KDE. I finally had a machine with 16GB ram to run it on (FWIW KDE seems slightly better at running on limited hardware now, but stil..) Its defaults made me angry, though (especially Konsole - seriously, no keyboard shortcuts to hit a specific tab? Tabs at the bottom [oposite edge to the menus and titlebar]?) but I can actually repair it a lot quicker than fixing Unity/Gnome.
It's been this long and they still can't make KDE remember the orientation/resolution/relative position of any monitor that isn't the primary one - if I'm going to suffer through that sort of thing I might as well give i3-wm a proper go. I was able to use it productively for a whole day recently, which is more than awesome and xmonad lasted for me.
I wish I could disagree, but I help so many users that run one program full screen. I just sit back and shake my head as they constantly switch from one program to another instead of arranging the program windows to see everything they need at one time.
It really start to piss me off when they have two monitors and switch between two programs, both on the main screen, both full screen. Then they wonder why it takes so long to get things done.
Except that the desktop cannot work using the phone/tablet model because user expectations do not suggest that metaphor when they sit at a desktop.
Even if the desktop metaphor was too complex to master, users still sit down at a desktop and think, "now where are my files?" because they intend to "do work in general" (have an array of their current projects and workflows available to them) rather than "complete a single task."
As was the case with a desk, they expect to be able to construct a cognitive overview of their "current work" at a computer—an expectation that they don't have with a phone, which is precisely experienced as an *interruption to* their "current work." KDE, Gnome, and most recently Windows 8, made the mistake of trying to get users to adopt the "interruption of work" mental map *as* the flow of work. It's never going to happen; they need to be presented with a system that enables them to be "at work." In practice, being "at work" is not about a single task, but about having open access to a series of resources about that the user can employ in order to *reason* about the relatedness and next steps across a *variety* of ongoing tasks. That's the experience of work for most workers in the industrialized world today.
If you place them in a single-task flow for "regular work" they're going to be lost, because they don't know what the task is that they ought to be working on without being able to survey the entirety of "what is going on" in their work life—say, by looking at what's collected on their desktop, what windows are currently open, how they're all positioned relative to one another, and what's visible in each window. Ala Lucy Suchman (see her classic UX work "Plans and Situated Actions"), users do not have well-specified "plans" for use (i.e. step 1, step 2, step 3, task 1, task 2, task 3) but are constantly engaged in trying to "decide what to do next" in-context, in relation to the totality of their projects, obligations, current situation, etc. Successful computing systems will provide resources to assist in deciding, on a moment-by-moment basis, "what to do next," and resources to assist in the construction of a decision-making strategy or set of habits surrounding this task.
The phone metaphor (or any single-task flow) works only once the user *has already decided* what to do next, and is useful only for carrying out *that task*. Once the task is complete, the user is back to having to decide "what to do next."
The KDE and GNOME experiments (at least early on) hid precisely the details necessary to make this decision easy, and to make the decision feel rational, rather than arbitrary. An alternate metaphor was needed, one to tell users how to "see what is going on, overall" in their computing workday. The desktop did this and offered a metaphor for how to use it (survey the visual field, which is ordered conceptually by me as a series of objects). Not only did the KDE and GNOME not offer a metaphor for how to use this "see what is going on" functionality, they didn't even offer the functionality—just a series of task flows.
This left users in the situation of having *lost* the primary mechanism by which they'd come to decide "what to do next" in work life for two decades. "Before, I looked at my desktop to figure out what to do next and what I'm working on. Now that functionality is gone—what should I do next?" It was the return of the post-it note and the Moleskine notebook sitting next to the computer, from the VisiCalc-on-green-screen days. It was a UX joke, frankly.
The problem is that human beings are culture and habit machines; making something possible in UX is not the same thing as making something usable, largely because users come with baggage of exactly this kind.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
For the most part i spend my time in browser, terminal, pdf reader, word processor and occasionally a dedicated IDE.
All i really want in a UI is the ability to switch between these apps without having to mentally switch contexts. On a non-touch computer, a menu list of installed apps+taskbar with a stacking window manager is ideal.
Linux users are not the only ones who are rejecting the new UIs. Everyone hates how windows 8 works.
There is clearly a need for new UIs for touch based machines. The mistake is trying to create one UI that works for both worlds - this is the mistake Win8 and GNOME3 made.
15 years ago, it was [kind of] cool to play around with config files, compile kernels and install different Linux distros the way women change their purses. Now we have other priorities in life, kids, pets, mortgages. We just want to get the job done. Sometimes I enjoy hacking some config files for fun, but it's not anymore something I'd do on a Friday night.
Open Source Network Inventory for the masses! Kuwaiba
I love WindowMaker but I just wish it would get with the times. It seriously need to add some (optional) eye candy. Would it be too hard to either add a compositor or at the very least add support for one of the many XWindow compositors out there (e.g. xcompmgr and compton). Real transparency, that is really all I want.
Seriously, I love WindowMaker but 1997 was 17 years ago. It would be nice if it didn't look like it was still stuck in 1997.
Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 1 hour, 47 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
All Ican figure is that either the author either believes that it's not classic if we can customize a GUI to the point that it's no longer "classic" looking
In my opinion, a desktop that can be easily customized to act "classic" is classic enough, so long as users are made aware of this customizability. But there's a practical problem with presenting too many options for customizability. See the section "The Question of Preferences" in this article.
or is judging it based on the first few releases when it wasn't fully functional as a 'classic' desktop yet
A not-yet-fully-functional GUI shouldn't be shipped as the default GUI of a GUI-oriented operating system until such time as it becomes fully functional.
Laugh if you want, I'm working on a product that's still shipping fvwm2 (recently updated from fvwm95...)
It's... sufficient, and the devil whose face we know - all of its shortcomings, bugs, and workarounds are well known and documented - unlike a "cutting edge" desktop that throws you a mystery quirk every so often that nobody knows about.
If you want a UNIX desktop that just works, then you get a Mac.
http://windowmaker.org/news.php
"
Version 0.95.5 released
Window Maker 0.95.5 was released on August 29th 2013.
"
took about 2 seconds to google that..
That being said, still doesn't have compositing support.
That being said, I agree - because of it's superior window managment as compared to anything else, I could care less.
I'm sure patches are welcome if anyone wants to code them.
Everyone wants a classic desktop, but no vendor wants to provide one. Microsoft wants everyone on Metro so they can take a cut of sales through the App Store. The KDE and Gnome teams want to experiment because it's more fun than maintaining a tried-and-true design. Apple is seemingly holding the line for now, but all it takes is one bad VP in the UI team and OSX will become a clone of iOS.
UI designers don't like the desktop metaphor for a variety of complicated philosophical reasons. They think it would be easier for people to learn how to use computers if it was abandoned. Maybe they're right about that – iOS has been very successful among non-technical users because it simplifies things a lot more than a standard W.I.M.P. design – but once you get beyond casual use and into doing real work, multitasking becomes a necessity, and there is still nothing better than a "classic desktop" for that.
No sense at all. And the article makes damn little sense either.
Give me that holographic 3-D translucent panel that I can throw data at by waving my hands around. As long as it runs a kernel with a UNIX philosophy and I can compile the entire thing from source like my current Gentoo distro I'll be happy.
All I ask is that you don't F' it up. If you make the decision that I don't *also* need a keyboard and a console window because 'who uses VI anymore to program when you can wave hands around' then you're full of it. I'm the one to decide if hand-waving is better, not you. If you toss out a half-done re-write like KDE 4.0 with regressions on every major integrated application, you deserve the hate. If you break the entire metaphor like Unity or Windows 8 did for the sake of some other platform you deserve the hate. If you abandon decades of proven philosophy on a whim just because, you deserve the hate.
On the other hand, if you have something truly unique, revolutionary, game-changing, bring it on. If it is truly a step forward the world will quickly abandon the old in favor of your new, my old self included. It's when you try replacing the old way forcibly in favor of your new that you fail. That's not your job. That's my (the user's) job.
Linus is currently using Gnome 3 again.
...that pressing the super key (aka windows key) and typing is not an innovation exclusive to windows 7 don't you?
IIRC win8 retains that ability though I don't use that os. My regular desktop is GNOME 3 and it works just like that too.
The thing with Win8 and GNOME3 is that there is so much angst over what amounts to the introduction of a full screen launcher to replace a stale but familiar cascading drop down menu launcher. In both cases once you launch the same old apps all that crap is out of sight.
Of the two however GNOME 3 is clearly superior in my experience to WIN8. Microsoft went even far beyond GNOME in hiding functionality--at least GNOME retained their equivalent of a start button. Also windows is a confusing mess because it presents the launcher as the application environment...but just for metro apps. Then there is still the old desktop...but without a visible launcher (until 8.1 anyways).
At least in GNOME 3 there is still a clear division...it is clear when you are on the desktop running apps and when you are in the launcher/Switcher. It still hides a bit too much config but it is evolving faster than windows and plugins are quite useful.
In any case I spend most of my time in a handful of apps, text editor and terminal and just tab between them so the desktop environment makes little difference to me.
The one thing that actually surprised me was how much faster beginners and casual users caught onto GNOME than win8. The latter had them mystified, especially coming from XP. Despite being different GNOME was much more intuitive for the most part. Both, however, caused power users much frustration because of their instinctive desire to tweak their environment. Casual users have no such compulsion...their focus is the apps not the environment they are hosted in, and if apps are easy to find and launch that is all that matters.
What you see is various software packages all reinventing what should only have to be done once, right.
Various people have invented corkboard ideas, on the mac Stickies is post-it notes and Scrivener is a research and writing system with corkboard as part of it. I have seen various drag and drop style interfaces for drawing uml or configuring networking. One package I am involved in now has a canvas you can drag and drop nodes in a flowchart.
Personally I had an idea for a tool that would draw on the desktop and define regions of it.
Currently the desktops I have seen are just a blank screen that inevitably gets filled up with crap which then has to get put somewhere, or it is just a few shortcuts. The manu bar (on a mac), the trashcan and doc are the only actually functioning items.
I would like to propose that the desktop should be an object oriented scriptable canvas with some intelligence, with storage, networking, layers, ability to transport them between instances and platforms, and something that actually helps you do your work. Smalltalk comes to mind. Anyway, my two cents. There is a lot of screen real estate but none of the operating systems actually do anything useful with it. The drawing tools that are out there in powerpoint, libreoffice or whatever are pitiful and unintuitive, so it takes a lot of work to make something useful and you don't use them in a meeting to illustrate something, you go to a whiteboard and scribble something illegible. Or you get out a big piece of paper. I'm saying a strong canvas with simple unbloated widgets in place of the desktop would be extremely useful as a standard computing component, instead of using the tons of little widgets that solve little bits of the problem.
The Windows '95 style desktop captures an ideal well. The MacOS 9 did as well, so does the original MacOs X design. The trouble is that they are far from perfect, but small deviations from the ideal makes for no real improvement, and large explorations away from the ideal tend to be horrible. Kde were probably the first to really wrestle with this horror, and they seem to be past the worst of it, though I have no idea where they're headed; gnome is trying to do the 'HUD Overlay Control / MoreThanAToyDashboard' thing which would be good if they work out how to do it well. But the Windows 95 style, with Gnome2 additions like desktop toolbars you can just stuff what you like in, are a good ideal.
I wish they would invest more effort in making it easy to repurpose what is there: make a simple Gnome Terminal a 3-line program:
w = Gnome.Window(menu=DefaultMenu,content=Terminal.Default)
w.content.run("/bin/bash",["-"])
w.show()
and make customising what the terminal window does as easy as this. Do likewise for getting a browse component running (recall the Cocoa browser demo on MacOsX?)
We should be working less to come up with new stuff, and more on making what we have both rock-solid, dead-simple, and as trivially easy to implement as possible. I wrote a little note about this idea on my Wiki: http://thewikiman.allsup.co/Im... where the idea is to write your program in your ideal imaginary language, and then build from the language you have towards that ideal, striving to make as much of what you produce reusable in other projects (and to share with others so that they don't have to repeat your progress: DRY is good, DRIP (Dont-Repeat-If-at-all-Possible) would be a better principle, since with proprietary software the DRY principle is violated whenever a different developer has to rewrite functionality because of legal or lack-of-source issues).
John_Chalisque
there are 30 years of detailed field research on this. Again, see Suchman's "Plans and Situated Actions," Dourish's "Where the Action Is," etc., or visit the ACM digital library and look at usability research (i.e. involving observation of real people in real settings) in CSCW, HCI, etc.
You have one basic fact wrong: they *do* have to think about what it's "time" to do.
Users in computer-at-desk contexts do not have a detailed roadmap for what to do on a click-by-click basis, either from their boss or inside their heads. They have a general set of goals for, say, the quarter ("Get this project launched"), perhaps the week ("Make sure everyone is on-task and progress is being made; keep the CTO appraised of any roadblocks"), and the day ("Put together charts and graphs for Wednesday's meeting to detail progress").
But it is *these* tasks that are "theoretical" quantities. They translate into dozens and dozens of clicks, mouse movements, UI interactions, and so on, many of them interdependent (or, in Suchman/Dourish terms, indexical—that is to say, order-important and constitutive of an evolving informational and UI flow context).
The user may have "Tell bob about tomorrow's meeting" already decided, but they are imagining Bob and imagining Bob *at* the meeting. From there, activity is practical and adaptive. They emphatically do *not* have this in their heads:
- Take mouse in right hand ...
- Flick mouse to lower-left to establish known position
- Move mouse 5 inches toward right, 0.5 inches toward top of desk to precise location of email icon
- Click email icon
- Wait 0.4 seconds for email window to appear
- Move mouse 7.2 inches toward top of desk, 2 inches toward left to precise location of To: field
- Click to focus on field
- Type "Bob"
- Wait 0.1 seconds for drop-down with completions to appear
- Hit down arrow three times to select correct Bob
- Press enter
You laugh, but in fact this is precisely what you're suggesting: that users have a roadmap already. They don't. That's why we invented the GUI—to provide a visual catalogue of available computing resources and an indication of how to access them on an as-needed basis. Then, the user has to decide, in the moment, what was needed. Every single attempt to make things more "simple" or more "efficient" by presenting *only* that one thing that designers imagined to be needed at a given time—the "obvious" next step—has led to users that either feel the system is useless, that fight it to get it to do what they want, or that simply go around the system (I'll just do this task offline, on a pad of paper). You can make very telling changes to users' productive workflows and levels of productivity by changing orderings or locations of icons, etc. Marketers also know this very well on the web (google "page hotspots" to see the research about positioning of advertising and how deeply it affects CPC and other factors in online marketing).
At a less granular level, something like "Get this project launched" is also not available in a detailed roadmap to a user. Go ahead, ask them to elaborate on the precise set of tasks involved in their big quarterly responsibility. They'll come up with 20, 30, maybe even 80 split into four or five sub-areas. But getting the project launched for an average middle manager over the course of a quarter involves tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of discrete actions, gestures, etc., some computing-based, some not, with the computing-based ones split across dozens of applications and contexts.
It cannot be mapped out because it is contingently assembled—it has to be done on an as-we-go-basis. So the tasks in the "to do list" (and, in fact, in cognitive behavior) are theorized ("Create a new instance of the platform on test VPN, set up credentials for team") rather than existing as a detailed, moment-by-moment list of actions. This is why user docs people actually have to sit down and use the system, and int
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Do they continue to be gainfully employed as a digger, yet still dig with their bare hands?
What do they and their boss know about their productivity and job requirements that you don't?
What are they digging for? Is it likely to be damaged by a spade? Are they relying on the tactile sensation in their hands as they dig to make critical digging decisions of some kind? What is the cost of spades? What is the urgency of this dig? Is the limited supply of spades reserved for cases in which rapid digs are needed, in order to avoid excessive spade wear? How long do they dig? Does the spade cause repetitive stress injuries or blisters that hamper their work later on, and for longer periods of time, despite the apparent productivity gains early on? Even if we go all the way to the silly end of the spectrum, are spades against their religion? Even if so, are they nonetheless the most productive member on their team even with bare hands, leading the boss to not give two damns whether they use a spade or a ball of cotton candy to do their work? If you mess with the magic sauce that makes them the most productive person on the team, are you going to be out of a job before they are, even if you believe that your orders for them to change are the "correct" ones?
It seems to me that the job of tech designers isn't to know about digging, but to listen to the diggers carefully as the experts on their kind of digging, digging needs, and the totality of their work life as diggers, and to thoughtfully provide the technical resources needed to enable diggers to do digging as they see fit. They are, after all, the diggers. We are the tech people. Our job is to make tech—which is merely a means to everyone else, not an end. Make the wrong means that doesn't help them to achieve their ends, and you will find that nobody values your tech, no matter how much you try to explain that a spade is a spade.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Linux users, as the article says, spent "years of tinkering" into getting a desktop to work exactly like we wanted.
That was achieved after some time. At least in my case, since about four years I have a desktop that exactly does what I want it to do exactly the way I want it to do it. So there is no longer a need for any big changes.
It's not that we "want or don't want change", it's just that we want change where it is needed, not change just for changes sake.