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Lobsters0 Hot0 comments30 min read
Ideas on modernizing the open-source desktop
Former Apple and Google UX designer Scott Jenson gave a talk at KDE's Akademy 2026 conference arguing that open-source desktop UX has stagnated for two decades, largely because the Linux community has relied on Apple and Microsoft to lead design innovation, and both companies have stopped taking risks. He shared anecdotes about Mac Finder ellipsis placement and window-raising behavior during drag-and-drop, addressed three common pushbacks against desktop innovation (mobile has won, WIMP is done, don't touch my stuff), and discussed layers of UX (style, structure, strategy, underlying technology constraints). He revisited historical projects like WinFS and KDE's NEPOMUK semantic desktop as ideas ahead of their hardware. He demonstrated prototypes including a widescreen-optimized window layout with an Exposé-like stash area, an Obsidian Canvas-inspired persistent clipboard, and a privacy-preserving working-memory system for browsing history, while cautioning against relying on frontier AI models due to ethical and environmental concerns and expressing interest in open, locally run models like Apertus.
Source: https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1095425/2d9f411252325784. 8 Sync News only summarizes and links out; content copyright belongs to the authors and original sources.
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