Ideas on modernizing the open-source desktop

Welcome to LWN.net The following subscription-only content has been made available to you by an LWN subscriber. Thousands of subscribers depend on LWN for the best news from the Linux and free software communities. If you enjoy this article, please consider subscribing to LWN. Thank you for visiting LWN.net! Scott Jenson has been working on user interfaces (UIs) and user experience (UX) for many years at Apple, Google, and other companies. Now, he's trying to convince open-source projects to experiment more and drive the desktop beyond the age-old "windows, icons, menus, pointer" (WIMP) model. At Akademy 2026, KDE's annual developer conference, he shared his complaints and ideas in a talk aimed at convincing those in attendance to take the lead on desktop design. He introduced himself as someone who has been doing UX for a long time, much of that time at Google. He said that over that time he had noticed a cultural shift, "because back in 2005 when I joined, we weren't evil; we were really trying to do the right thing". He had worked on the Chrome team for a while, which he said was "filled with people who wanted nothing but open-source, open-web" projects. Things had changed radically, which led him to leave Google, "but I'm trying to atone for my sins working for these companies". He now does work for Mastodon and Home Assistant, "just kind of trying to squeeze a little bit more good UX design into open source". Jenson said he did not want to be confrontational, but he thought that open source needs a lot of help in the area of UX design. That is challenging, because open-source projects are understaffed. Innovation He was at Akademy to discuss his ideas because he had given a talk similar to this at Ubuntu's conference last year, which proved to be popular. "It got more than half a million views on YouTube—which by YouTube standards is trivial, but by Scott standards is enormous." That told him that the topic of desktop UX was something that people wanted to talk about. This time around, he also wanted to show a few examples of prototypes he had to demonstrate his ideas. He thinks that desktop UX is very different from other kinds of UX. Jenson related a story about working on the Macintosh's Finder application, which is a file manager. The team "wanted to do ellipses" in file names when showing a file in the Finder that had a name too long to display in its entirety. The developers wanted to put the ellipsis at the end of the file name, but he thought that would lose too much information, and suggested that the ellipses should be in the middle of the file names. "It's now considered to be one of those things that's an exciting little attention-to-detail issue the Macintosh does." Another UX detail that he worked on is the way that clicking and dragging files from one window to another works on the Mac. A mouse click action has two parts: when the user depresses the button (mouse down) and when the user releases the button (mouse up). On the Mac, item selection happens on mouse down, but the window only raises on the mouse up action. In other words, if a user drags an icon from a Finder window into another window, the first window is not raised. On most Linux systems, though, if a user is trying to click and drag a file from a window in the background it will cause the window to raise as soon as the user does the "mouse down" action. That complicates trying to click and drag a file from one window to another. That is a fundamental action that means that users can't move data into applications quite as easily on Linux as they can on the Mac. He said that he had talked about that issue two years ago on Mastodon, which raised a response from a KDE developer who thought it was a good idea to separate the mouse down and mouse up actions when dragging data between windows. Then they implemented it a few hours later. "I forgot who that was. So if anybody here did that", he said, but before he could finish the sentence a voice from somewhere in the room responded, "you're welcome". Jenson yelled "thank you! I've been wanting to meet you for two years!" That was an example, he said, of how open source can be awesome: someone can just say "that's a good idea, I'll just do it" and then rapidly implement and push the feature to the project. Stabilized The point he was really trying to make, though, is that the desktop UX had not really changed in 20 years. There were plenty of new ideas and improvements in the 1980s and 1990s, "and then it just stabilized, and not much has really changed". But people are doing much more with their computers today, and he thinks that there are ways for desktop UX to grow. Much of the UX for Linux systems was originally copied from Windows and the Mac, "KDE even says it's for Windows users, that it wants to be similar to Windows for users". There's nothing wrong with that, but he felt that the Linux community "in general" had been leaning on Microsoft and Apple to do all of the UX research and testing, "and frankly, [make] the mistakes". Some might point out that GNOME has conducted user research for some of its design changes, and KDE's human-interface guidelines (HIG) were also developed based on research by its contributors. However, it would be fair to say that these are exceptions rather than the norm; certainly, no one is funding or conducting regular UX design research and development for the Linux desktop overall. He said that it is smart to let Apple and Microsoft do these things first "so we can draft behind them", but the problem is that "they've just kind of given up to an extent". Apple has been letting its desktop UX, and desktop hardware, "languish for years and years and years" because it had shifted its focus to the iPhone and iPad devices. "I mean, like, Apple wanted the Mac to die. They wanted the world to move over to the iPad. Guess what? It didn't." Apple has since turned its attention back to the Mac, but the things they've done since—such as the Liquid Glass design language—have not been really popular with users. The features that Apple tends to add, he said, are "basically about tying it closer to the iPhone, tying you closer into their ecosystem". That isn't about improving the desktop, it's about increasing their moat. Microsoft "is just making one mistake after another". He cited the company's attempts to force users to store files using its OneDrive cloud-storage service, the privacy-invasive Windows Recall feature that drew widespread criticism, and "ads everywhere" on the Windows desktop. His point was not to bash Apple or Microsoft, though the audience didn't seem to object to this, it was to point out that the Linux desktop could not follow their example any longer. "The whole Linux community has been just waiting for Apple and Microsoft, more or less, to take all the risks, and they're not taking any more risks." Three pushbacks Jenson emphasized that he didn't want to change everything, but he wanted to see experiments and additional development aimed at improving the desktop experience. However, he said that he gets pushback when he tells people that desktop innovation has stopped, and that the Linux desktop "can't just patch and bug fix our way into the future, we have to start taking leadership ourselves". He grouped the pushback into three categories. The first objection he receives is "mobile won; the desktop is old, just do what mobile does". He dismissed that by saying that mobile has indeed won the consumer market, social media, and other areas, but "it didn't win productivity". People still do their work on computers, because "desktops are silently awesome; they have keyboards and big screens, and they can do amazing things". However, people have lost sight of that and don't really appreciate how good desktops are. "I think we should understand why they're good, and then what we can do to make them better." The second objection he hears is that there are only so many ways that the WIMP model can work. "Just stop trying to fix it; it's done." He disagreed with that as well, and thought that there was more to be done. 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. "And I get that. As I said before, I don't want to change everything." But the world is changing, "and we need to grow our way gently into some new things." What is UX? Thinking about where to go next with desktop design gets to the question "what is UX?" He said that term was misunderstood and that people, especially manager types, "they think it's just pixels, but UX is so much more than pixels". It helps to think of UX as having layers, he said. There is style, which consists of white space, iconography, color schemes, and yes, pixels. But there is also structure, he said, which is how the user moves through the application, the navigation model. Strategy is another part of UX; understanding who the target user is, and determining what they want. Deciding what is important, and what is not; what will the development team prioritize and what will it ignore? "The fastest way a UX designer can save your team time is to help you say no." There is also a layer he called "stuff": the lower-level limitations of the underlying technology that a platform has which influence UX. For example, he said, if an application is being created for DOS, "you're not going to write a nice Macintosh application. The technology dictates what you can do". The desktop has been evolving for 40 years and has "historical cruft" that carries expected standards. We just have a bunch of stuff that we just accepted. And I think if we're going to fix the desktop, we have to understand this lower-level limitation, and how do we want to fix that? We just accept that mobile and desktop has stuff