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Comment by torben-friis | Hacker News Reader

> KDE is my desktop of choice. I feel like it captures the spirit of computing in the Windows 9x era.

I find this sad. It is a sign of lack of innovation in desktop environments.

As a teen I loved fiddling with linux because it had compiz/beryl, etc. You could make windows explode in fire when closed, see the desktop as a 3d cube, etc.

It was all trashy eyecandy, and of little use, but the point is that there was experimentation.

Nowadays I don't think there's a lot to see, the options are:

- 90's-like UX - terminal focused setups (tiling windows managers, etc) - dumbed down tablet-like experience.

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I think desktop design in the 90s reached a point similar to car design did in the mid 1910s; the lack of innovation is a sign of maturity. Almost every car since the Cadillac Type 53 has had more or less the same controls; a steering wheel, foot pedals for the accelerator/brake/clutch with accelerator on the right, brake to the left of that, and clutch to the left of the brake. Some deviation from this scheme is tolerable, new automatic systems sometimes replace manual controls like the clutch pedal, but for the most part every new car either conforms to this general scheme or sets itself apart as a weird outlier. Rarely there is a car with a yoke or joystick instead of a steering wheel, but it never catches on.

Even if you managed to discover something marginally better but radically different, it probably wouldn't catch on because the status quo gets the job done and everybody already understands it. Re-learning how to drive because your car came with a joystick instead of a steering wheel isn't appealing to most people who view their car as a means to an end.

(Also, I don't think there's an intrinsic connection between tiling window managers and terminal-focused setups. The apparent correlation between the two is a coincidence; the sort of people who choose one also often choose the other. GUI file managers and the like work fine under tiling window managers.)

I switched back to KDE a few days ago, after having used GNOME for about a decade. One thing that made me really happy is that wobbly windows are an option again! (There's a plugin for GNOME 3 to enable them but it has unusable graphical issues on all computers I've tested it on.) It's nice to be able to reenable some of those effects that got me to try Linux out in the first place.

> I find this sad. It is a sign of lack of innovation in desktop environments.

Most of the modern OS developments focus on making things easy and safe. That usually boils down on removing features and locking down things.

And more generally, there is no gurantee that the new thing is better than the old one.

> Most of the modern OS developments focus on making things easy and safe. That usually boils down on removing features and locking down things.

Fair enough, but innovation should not necessarily be more complex. See pinch-to-zoom in the first iPhone as an example of a groundbreaking addition that makes things simpler.

Pinch to zoom is nice, but relies on a sort of peripheral that most desktop computers don't have. To make a mainstream desktop system, you can't assume the user has more than a keyboard and mouse. And so the usual ctrl + / ctrl - shortcuts for scaling/zooming remain, even though they're usually superfluous to laptop users with touchpads.

All kinds of things like that have been added to desktop environments. Things like hot corners to "Exposé" the windows or show all your virtual desktops, gestures for minimizing all your windows or flipping through them. Dragging windows such that they snap into certain geometries for an assisted manual sort of tiling. Despite all these additions, things which Windows 95 didn't have, the typical desktop environment would still seem reasonably familiar to a time-traveling Windows 95 user because the primary input devices are still keyboard and mouse and therefore desktop environments all work the same way, broadly speaking.

KDE has the same exploding windows and other window effects.

My point was not that those effects from 20 years ago are unavailable, it's that I have not seen current similarly experimental projects that expand what we think of as a desktop.

There is nothing (that I know of) that feels as groundbreaking for 2022 as compiz was for 2006

You see this a lot though. It’s because it becomes harder and harder to do something new and different when it’s all sort of been done before. Innovating something that’s been done to death is a lot harder than innovating when things are still less well defined.

I think video games are in this same space. Rarely does a game actually innovate or come up with something truly novel anymore. Ultima Online was the most amazing thing I ever saw at the time, but now that I’ve seen a million different MMOs the entire genre feels stale. Have fighting games really advanced much from either a Street Fighter type, Mortal Kombat, Marvel Vs Capcom or Smash Brothers style? What about action adventure - is God of War Ragnarok innovating anything? It doesn’t feel that different than playing any number of other games, just maybe more polished. Uncharted is just another take on Tomb Raider at the end of the day. Same thing with movies or television. There just isn’t that much new ground to break.

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