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Scott Jenson
Scott Jenson
@scottjenson@social.coop  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

My Ubuntu Summit talk is up! Where I talk about:
1. How Desktop UX is effectively dead
2. Why I hate the term UX/UI with the heat of 1000 suns
3. How OSS can actually innovate in #ux

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fZTOjd_bOQ

Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? | Ubuntu Summit 25.10
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Jonathan Schofield
Jonathan Schofield
@urlyman@mastodon.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 3 days ago

@scottjenson brilliant. Thanks :)

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Kenny Park
Kenny Park
@KennyPark@mastodon.scot replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

@scottjenson Fabulous, even for a layperson such as myself.

And, in addition to text editing, I've often opined that the onscreen keyboard experience is utterly terrible, and yet Apple seem inexplicably happy with it (judging by how it never improves).

Many thanks.

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Antimundo
Antimundo
@antimundo@mastodon.gamedev.place replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

@scottjenson I've already watched it, very interesting talk!

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Aras Pranckevičius
Aras Pranckevičius
@aras@mastodon.gamedev.place replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

@scottjenson excellent talk, thanks!

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tsk
tsk
@tasket@infosec.exchange replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

@scottjenson "KDE saw my post and fixed it"... And we should be talking about why we put Gnome stickers on our kit.

Gnome UI is like one of those sock monkeys where at first you notice that the mouth and one eye is missing, and each time you come back to it a hand or a leg or something else is suddenly missing. They are aping MacOS sleekness without supplying the kind of "advanced tab" or option-key advanced features that keep the Mac UI powerful. Their main dev ethos is to lop off something if it presents any kind of maintenance challenge. To add insult to injury, their env is roughly the same size as KDE.

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aeva
aeva
@aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

@scottjenson I have an interest in making experimental window managers for Linux, but I'm under the impression such a project is a significant undertaking in engineering effort. Is that generally correct? Is there a way forward for small time hobby experimentation, or is this sort of thing pretty much the exclusive territory of large organizations now days?

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aeva
aeva
@aeva@mastodon.gamedev.place replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

@scottjenson (apologies if the talk covers this, I don't have time to watch it at the moment)

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JP
JP
@jplebreton@mastodon.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

@scottjenson thanks for the talk. some of it reminded me how we can't really rely on drag for as much, specifically on desktop, because of the divergent ergonomics of mouse vs trackpad (which a huge % of users now have in place of a mouse, and dragging is usually markedly worse).
having to support practically everything and be deeply multi-paradigm is such a formidable constraint and it makes it harder to make the kinds of exciting bold commitments that uncover promising new directions.

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mmu_man
mmu_man
@mmu_man@m.g3l.org replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

@scottjenson "There isn't anything left to copy!"

…

Looks at #HaikuOS …

😒

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Steffen Voß
Steffen Voß
@kaffeeringe@social.tchncs.de replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

@scottjenson Thank you for the great talk!

I am not at all an expert on user interfaces. But I recently thought that Linux is so versatile. It runs on mobile phones and web servers. The difference is the user interface.

Our state government is currently moving to Linux and I thought - why don't they build a specialized Desktop that fits their special needs?

E.g. people aren't supposed to save files on their device anymore. But how do you integrate "the cloud" in a way that it seems to be locally, and you hide all the local stuff.

And they have their special eFiles system. How do you create a UI around an important application?

I wrote some loose thoughts about that in my blog (German), hoping that someone might pick them up: https://kaffeeringe.de/2025/12/12/ein-modernes-betriebssystem-fuer-die-arbeitwelt/

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Leander Lindahl
Leander Lindahl
@leanderlindahl@mastodon.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

@scottjenson seems interesting. Maybe put it in PeerTube too? (So I can watch it)

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Scott Jenson
Scott Jenson
@scottjenson@social.coop replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

@leanderlindahl I'd have to steal it ;-)

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Leander Lindahl
Leander Lindahl
@leanderlindahl@mastodon.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

@scottjenson ah... didn't think of that.

Who "owns" it? Canonical? Maybe we can ask them? If need be, I have an old PeerTube instance to put it on.

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Fred
Fred
@fred@oldbytes.space replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

@scottjenson

Hi Scott,

Just watched your talk, awesome. I love UX, I have loved computers for so many years, and I am so disappointed at everything we lost since the original Mac.

I am also the author of MacFlim (https://www.macflim.com/macflim2), and I was stunned when it came on screen when you talked about the original Mac! (screenshot attached).

I don’t know if it is random or on purpose. MacFlim was created as a joke, and as most joke it is about a very serious point, exploring a possible future where we still use those Mac and continued exploring what they could do. MacFlim 1.0 is an hommage at the original Mac user interface, with multiple windows, etc. MacFlim 2.0, which is a couple orders of magnitude more sophisticated and a real movie player, steals from the future by implementing a Netflix-like user interface. I think we regressed. There is so much more we should be doing with the monsters we have under our desk on in our pocket…

Anyway, that made my day, thanks!

Btw, the “the click doesn’t bring the window front because it could be the start of a drag” comes from NeXTstep. It infuriates me that we forgot that in so many desktop UIs. Or the subtle way one should manage the launched of an application to be sure it takes focus if the user waited, but doesn’t steal it if the user interacted with another app..

https://www.macflim.com/macflim2
Scott on stage shows the UI of the original Macintosh. There is a folder containing MacFlim, a modern movie player for the original Macs…
Scott on stage shows the UI of the original Macintosh. There is a folder containing MacFlim, a modern movie player for the original Macs…
Scott on stage shows the UI of the original Macintosh. There is a folder containing MacFlim, a modern movie player for the original Macs…
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Mindaugas Rudokas
Mindaugas Rudokas
@mrudokas@mastodon.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

@scottjenson This talk shouldn’t be needed. But somehow it is. So, thanks for pushing this!

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J. Blake
J. Blake
@jblake@mastodon.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

@scottjenson This was great, thanks!

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Christian Tietze
Christian Tietze
@ctietze@mastodon.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

@scottjenson This popped into my YouTube feed two days ago, loved it!

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Alexander Langanke Kohls
Alexander Langanke Kohls
@alexanderlangankekohls@mastodon.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

@scottjenson I enjoyed your Talk very much!

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Ankur Oberoi
Ankur Oberoi
@aoberoi@mastodon.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

@scottjenson this is the best talk I’ve seen in years. Thanks so much for sharing your perspective and pushing others to do more with their imagination.

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Daniel Jonsson
Daniel Jonsson
@DanOpcode@mastodon.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

@scottjenson sounds interesting! Will listen

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Jeff Atwood
Jeff Atwood
@codinghorror@infosec.exchange replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

@scottjenson have we tried a bunch of icons arranged in a vaguely rectangular shape?

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Scott Jenson
Scott Jenson
@scottjenson@social.coop replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

@codinghorror rectangles are _so_ passé... We should be exploring spirals...

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sammypanda
sammypanda
@sammypanda@aus.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

@scottjenson i watched it ^_^ it was very cool. I liked the mario example to explain how getting as much dimension as possible out of one button. Also the clashing of devs and designers brought some clarity to the matter, i've never boiled it down to it's components like that amariokartprincess

i do think a recall sorta api is a privacy nighmare even if the processing is local-first (wooo ink+switch) though thats probably expected 😁 (crucially though on the meta level of: even if we do it in open source anyway, we give the window to FANG to do it; and in the current consumer landscape that only adds to the data farming nightmare we are in). Also i did wonder: people rejected iPhones to start with.. but also we kinda still do; we generally see smartphones as a bigger issue than a benefit—it seems it only gets seen as something to continue (or to look back fondly on) because on the flipside it extracts from and so effectively keeps consumers on it (despite the almost universally unhealthy relationship).

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burns etc.
burns etc.
@alvaroburns@mastodon.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

@scottjenson What a great talk! Thank you

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Daniel Wood
Daniel Wood
@dubstar_04@fosstodon.org replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

@scottjenson great talk! You are an excellent presenter. Thank you for sharing.

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Alexandre B A Villares 🐍
Alexandre B A Villares 🐍
@villares@ciberlandia.pt replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

@scottjenson great talk, I really enjoyed it!

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mray
mray
@mray@social.tchncs.de replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

@scottjenson Did you ever consider to collect your talks in a single peertube channel (or somewhere else)? I'd love to know I didn't miss any and that it will remain available without gatekeeping.

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🌈 Lascapi ⁂
🌈 Lascapi ⁂
@lascapi@social.tchncs.de replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

Thank you so much @scottjenson to encourage us to "color outside the lines" 😌

I tried to drag and drop a file from a window behind in #KDE and that work perfectly as you said in the video ^^

#UX #HumanInterface

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Adrian McEwen
Adrian McEwen
@amcewen@mastodon.me.uk replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago

@scottjenson great talk. And thanks for doing this advocacy.

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