I have watched many videos in regard to the fact that we haven’t had many ground braking to changes to UX and (somewhat partly UI) in the past 20 years. And some videos say desktop linux is fragmented. And I looked to Apple and i saw there design philosophy which in one sentence is Identify the problem and fix it in a way that is human. I want the UI and UX to change going forward and i would like to see what is wrong that needs to be fixed.
I think Pop!_OS has been addressing this overtime with the changes they made to the base GNOME DE and now with their new COSMIC DE in version 24.04.
Hi there!
Im just going to throw my ramblings into this discussion as a bystander.
We now had user interfaces on computers since, like, more than 40 years? And even the most modern ways of using computing devices with a 2D screen (smartphones) are established since almost two decades.
Even the distinct UX of GNOME with workspaces is now more than a decade old.
So we’ve had quite some time to get experiences about UX. A lot of the fundamentals have been figured out and many of the concepts for UX have matured.
Which us why, in my view, ground breaking changes are difficult to find.
Its not like there aren’t ways of improvement. Its just that they are not entirely new concepts, but iterations and improvements of existing ones.
Think of GNOME: GNOME’s UX concept with workspaces and the activities view were introduced back in 2011. This was a big change in the UX concept back the.
And there have been many changes since then, like the orientation change in GNOME 40. But, ultimately, they have been iterations on the same concept, since the concept itself is quite sound if you ask me.
Now, not everyone is a big fan of GNOME’s concept for UX, which brings me to:
Since we’re talking about UX here, I will not go into distribution and such, but focus on the desktops.
And its true: We have a lot of desktops with very different concepts for UX.
We have GNOME with its workspaces and activities view. We have KDE with “configure it all”. We have Cinnamon with “keep it close to Windows”. We have Ubuntu with whatever the concept behind Unity was.
So yeah, there are many different views on how to do UX. And that’s a good thing.
Not everyone has the same idea of the ideal desktop. For me, its an very vanilla like GNOME. For some, its a Windows-like desktop, others an Mac-like, even other prefer tiling shells.
And I think its great to have different desktops which provide these different options.
If there is anything, it’s that there should be few barriers between these desktops, so that user can find the one for them. And, under Linux, these barriers are already low. On many distributions, you can install multiple desktops at the same time. You can use an app made for GNOME on KDE. And thanks to co-developed standards and stuff like the XDG Desktop Portals we can have things like native file choosers or desktop-independent accent colors or dark mode.
As always, there is room for improvement, of course. But it is already at an good place in my view.
And I’d say the same is true for the “distribution fragmentation” as well in most regards.
Its great to see interest into improving the UI and UX of GNOME. But, as mentioned before, its more likely that iterative improvements are needed than an revolutionary new concept.
In fact, the design method from Apple you’ve mentioned is an iterative method from my point of understanding.
So, if you’re interested in improving GNOME’s design, here is what I would say:
First, get to know the current design and its intentions. Like by using a vanilla GNOME desktop (with Fedora or GNOME OS for example) and reading up on it’s existing Human Interface Guidelines.
And then to follow the design philosophy you’ve mentioned:
Identify areas in which the goals of the UX are not fully fulfilled by the current design and find a improvement to it.
And then discuss the findings with the design team, to find things you’ve might missed or things that could work well.
Finally, if a good improvement can be made, you could coordinate with the developers of the software to get the improvement into the software.
For more resources, I’d recommend looking at the team page of the design team, especially about the Getting up to Speed section and where to find the team: