from Hacker News

On Desktop GUI Minimalism

by netdoll on 9/9/23, 6:23 PM with 91 comments

• by fellowniusmonk on 9/9/23, 9:39 PM

  I think issues with attempts to redefine pc computing interfaces is that despite what is stated people are not actually starting from first principles when they go to redesign a personal computing GUI interface.

  Even in this article just a few sentences after stating we should start from first principles he then jumps into the assumption of the "desktop".

  The baggage of TTY interfaces in textual interfaces and the "desktop" paradigm for GUI interfaces is preventing people from going back to actual first principles for designing personal computing interfaces.

  Of course I do appreciate that since the title of the articles is minimalist desktop GUIs the assumption of "first principles of computing assuming a desktop analog" is baked into the article, I just think it's insufficient.

• by errantmind on 9/10/23, 11:04 AM

  > I even briefly used a tiling window manager before very quickly returning to the floating ones; the appeal of such utterly inflexible window management I will simply never understand.

  The author mentions this design in passing but I think it is contextually important to understand why people might like this at all so I'll share what I appreciate about tiling window managers:

  The appeal, for me, is the inflexibility. Tiling window managers and their often bundled 'tags' approach to window management offer a simplicity that is comforting in its constancy to me, the user. To sum it up, they make me feel 'at home' using my computer. Comfy goes beyond familiarity though.

  I never have a mess of windows to deal with across my monitors, where I'm constantly needing to look at a taskbar, minimizing and un-minimizing programs (or looking through a stack of 'shaded' windows in the author's case). Each of my frequently used programs has its own tag, or shares a tag (visually as a tile) with other programs. While the programs I have open at any one time change, their locations don't. Everything in its right place, I always know what is where. I switch between all programs directly with ease, with no intermediate interruptions to occupy my attention, my hands never leaving my keyboard. No 'looking' for stuff. Switches happen instantly because there are no transitions or any other forms of detectable latency (and for that matter, no compositor either). Combine all this with extensive use of scratchpads for ad-hoc and exploratory tasks and all the bases have been covered. Comfy.

• by BwackNinja on 9/10/23, 12:08 AM

  MacOS 9 and the spatial desktop metaphor is neat. I went that route for a while. What this misses, however, is that the biggest problem with the desktop interface is that we've substantially increased application complexity and laptops (and even smaller devices) won. As a result, we're trying to answer the question "how we fit our skeuomorphic paradigm in a diminutive form factor". The inspiration involved much larger actual desks and tables where you can freely arrange several documents that are each visible and can be reached at a glance. If you're maximizing the window for a document for reasons beyond helping you focus, then your workspace ahem your screen is too small.

  The screenshot is 1920x1080. Screens are sold using buzzwords like 'HD', 'UHD', and 'retina' that evoke a sense of image clarity. I spent years telling my dad that I liked higher resolutions because it meant more /space/ and he couldn't grasp what I meant. He was stuck on associating higher resolution with clarity until I bought him a 43" 4k monitor, and he used it for a while. Even at 1.5x scaling, suddenly, he was able to view multiple pages of a document clearly at the same time without even scrolling. This isn't at all a normal desktop setup or the kind of setup that desktop environments are optimizing for or advocating. But it works better and better matches the inspiration.

• by bstar77 on 9/10/23, 1:49 AM

  Two years ago, I transitioned to a minimalist tiling window manager (WM) despite my initial reservations about them. This change was prompted by my desire to experiment with high-end hardware and a 4K multi-monitor setup in a tiled environment. Surprisingly, the switch turned out to be a game-changer, boosting my productivity significantly, with around 90% of my tasks now occurring in the terminal. Traditional criticisms of terminals, such as memorization challenges and lack of guidance, no longer apply, thanks to modern features like auto-completion, interactive history, suggestions, and plugins like Git integration. Unfortunately, the reluctance to embrace this minimalist, terminal-centric approach may hinder power users from unlocking its full potential due to long-standing biases and a fear of change.

• by GlenTheMachine on 9/10/23, 2:01 AM

  I recently ran across helloSystem (https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/), which has as its hook the idea that we should base a unified desktop environment around the original Macintosh user interface guidelines. And while it's still pretty rough around the edges, it has FreeBSD underneath and I'm cautiously hopeful that it will turn into a useable desktop.

• by colordrops on 9/9/23, 11:27 PM

  Speaking of minimalist desktops, I'm really loving the unix-y philosophy behind sway/i3/hyprland/xmonad. Instead of an integrated desktop environment, you start with the simple window manager (Sway in my case), and pick and choose the tools you need for various things, such as a status bar, notifications, launcher, etc. Unless you really trick it out, there is usually very little on your screen other than the apps you are working with, as these window managers are primarly keyboard driven.

  Furthermore, I use the tiling functionality heavily. There are about 10 apps I use regularly, and they launch and get bound to a particular workspace on startup. My screen remains uncluttered, with one app filling the viewport, and a single keystroke to switch to the other apps I use. It's pretty close to perfect for my use cases.

  Lastly, these WMs are all configured through text files, so your exact configuration can be stored in dot files in git. In my case I use Nix, so I can redeploy my exact setup on any machine without any manual configuration.

• by MrVandemar on 9/9/23, 11:04 PM

  Interesting article, and the author makes some excellent points (especially about the pernicious encroachment of "touch" interfaces for systems that are fundamentally driven by keyboard and mouse on large screens) but they start with speculating about starting from scratch for desktop paradigms and ends up:

  > What I have now is a reasonable facsimile of the classic Mac OS UI functionality in Linux, minus little niceties like the aforementioned popup folders, and I've found that I need basically nothing beyond that to work incredibly efficiently.

  While it's one of the killer features of linux that you have enormous flexibility in how you use it and set it up, the screen-shot gives me the heebie-jeebies. Visually it's too noisy. I couldn't concentrate with that clutter screaming in my face.

  Nb: I'm a i3 + command-line guy.

• by bluepoint on 9/9/23, 10:45 PM

  Cool insights in Desktop! I really hope that someone comes up with a desktop metaphor for the hundreds of open browser tabs (which I think are the new bookmarks) that hang open in an endless horizontal list. Imagine tabs which are like documents, can be moved around, minimized, and spatially organized in folders and subfolders. Actually, why does this not exist somehow?

• by 0x38B on 9/10/23, 2:16 AM

  > Shortly thereafter my family gained access to broadband internet and I was able to delve into Linux again, this time thankfully without obliterating my computer's access to the outside world.

  As a teenager, my first experience with Linux (a Fedora book & CD combo) was formatting my main Windows drive with all my data on it. Good times.

• by 40yearoldman on 9/10/23, 1:51 AM

  Minimal desktops are productivity boosters. On top of that ones that can be controlled by keyboard input are super important.

  99% of the time you just want information. Text. The chrome does not matter. Yet modern desktops and web pages make humans hunt and pick through poorly designed interfaces to get the info we need.

  I use EXWM. It’s a time saver. I have no desktop because I am either using the full screen for a single application or flip flopping between a few apps that share the entire screen. This means every pixel of the screen is used and not wasted on useless images of empty fields.

  In top of that I am able to designate windows and frames for specific jobs or functions, always able to recall the last terminal or most relevance.

  We fucked up with movable windows. They are inefficient complicated and bring little value over a simple list of activities to switch between.

• by vidarh on 9/10/23, 7:27 AM

  I find it kind of funny that they see Mate and Caja as a good basis for something minimalist. I just transitioned off Caja to a homegrown "file manager" that is so basic it makes Caja seem like a swiss army knife. Largely because of all my virtual desktops only one uses floating windows, and don't need many features for it, but the features I care about I want to be able to tune exactly how I want them, and it was easier to write something from scratch than "fixing" Caja. And by "fixing" Caja I mean tuning the "spatial" aspects that it seems most desktop environments have lost interest in.

  On the minimalist side, we're all bikeshedding, and the biggest challenge is that there are more theories about what a nice interface should be like than there are users...

• by Jedd on 9/9/23, 11:33 PM

  > All computing up to the point of its [Apple Mac] introduction, at least from the "shell" standpoint of launching programs and managing files, was done exclusively through typing commands at the computer; you effectively had to program it, to a degree. The creators of the first Macintosh had the mouse, the desktop metaphor, and the menubar, and did their damnedest to make sure the user of their new paradigm-shifting computer ...

  The wording has some ambiguity, but it does sound like TFA hasn't heard of Xerox or Perq - perhaps attributing some misplaced invention, rather than popularisation, to Apple.

  Subsequently reinforced my suspicion:

  > The spirit of the Macintosh spread throughout all of computing; the GUI was inexorably the future.

  I think with desktop minimalism there's two broad interpretations - a desktop metaphor that is simple (has (frustratingly) few features), versus one that is complex but can be configured to be simple to operate.

  I like the fact I can very precisely adjust the width and colour of my window borders, but it's not a configuration item I visit more than once every few years, so I wouldn't say the option adds to the complexity of the interface. (Disclaimer - I've never used MATE.)

  > Oddly enough, only GNOME has had any kind of distinct vision

  The author did use KDE early on (version 3, but says they've only been using a computer for a decade and change).

  They're aware of other desktops, then, including the one that's arguably put the most effort into having a consistent user experience.

  The discussion on navigating through minimised windows I think boils down to a consideration of how to represent complexity - similarly their discussion of the launcher - almost inevitably a hierarchy is required if we are aiming to 'avoid the keyboard at all costs'. People have different GUI preferences there - mine is generally narrow and deep, over wide and shallow.

• by Wowfunhappy on 9/10/23, 2:28 PM

  > An application launcher menu would simply be a folder you open like any other, containing launchers. Open the folder, size and shape it how you want, put it in whatever view style you want, and stick it somewhere on your screen.

  The author is not taking the metaphor far enough! He left out one of my favorite pieces of Mac OS.

  The folder should not contain application launchers. It should contain the actual applications themselves. An application is just a file. To "install" an application, copy the file to a location on your hard drive. To "uninstall" an application, delete the file.

  Under the hood, applications can be a collection of files, whatever, but the GUI should treat each application as one file.

• by nirui on 9/10/23, 10:17 AM

  As a Gnome 40+ user for the past three years, and before that, XFCE and Awesome WM, based on my experience... NONE of these desktop/WM managed to resolve cluttering.

  Awesome WM gives you an organized clutter if you opened too many windows that's not bare-minimum terminals, while XFCE with all it's window UI elements made the clutter even worse (but you can just minimize the window). The new Gnome just made it so that opening more than three windows under the same workspace gives you nightmares due to lack of a dock as well as minimize buttons.

  (Now, to clarify, I had good experiences with all the desktop/wms mentioned above, so it's not a criticize, more of pointing out my desires)

  If you take a look at the screenshot presented in the article, I don't really think it's a productive desktop any more because it takes at least 5 seconds to find the window that you wanted. I mean, I'm sure MATE has tried it's best there, but... I think we are all limited by the lack of imagination of how a good desktop should be like.

  For me, I resolved my clutter problems by installing a Dock extension as well as (most importantly, actually) adding an external monitor. So finally I can comfortably open more than 6 windows at a time :) (Yep, I keep the tree windows that I wanted on the main monitor and throw the rest of clutters to the second one :)

• by mst on 9/10/23, 1:22 PM

  > I have an infinite number of separate workspaces, each arranged in their own way. I like being able to see and have at-hand everything at once on one screen, which is an illusion best maintained, for me, by a single desktop. Even more than one monitor is more of an "immersion-breaker" than I care to mentally deal with.

  I feel exactly the same way but solve it by having an fvwm2 configuration that makes my workspace 3x3 (currently) of the physical screen size and I can scroll the viewport around that to taste.

  See https://trout.me.uk/X11/fvwm2rc for my configuration if curious (for a more actual-GUI-ish workflow you'd want to configure more of its features, I generally just have lots of xterms and maybe a firefox - see https://trout.me.uk/screenshot4.png)

• by Avshalom on 9/10/23, 12:55 AM

  It's a shame that rox filer is functionally dead and the rox desktop ecosystem (small as it was) is even dead-er I think author would have enjoyed it.

• by globular-toast on 9/10/23, 9:41 AM

  I'm so lucky that I get to tinker with Linux, Emacs etc in my free time and then actually use those tools for work. It's like having a hobby car and then getting paid to drive it around. If you love tinkering with computers too then do avoid taking golden handcuffs tying you to a Windows job. It's just so much more fulfilling to make things that are actually useful.

• by et1337 on 9/10/23, 3:09 AM

  There’s no accounting for taste… I disagreed with just about every single preference the author expressed. Which challenges my normal wishful thinking, which is that somewhere out there is a perfect GUI that satisfies everyone’s needs.

• by rtz121 on 9/10/23, 8:51 AM

  That's not a good background color. Very hard to read.

• by torstenvl on 9/9/23, 10:59 PM

  TLDR: How to hack MATE to get window shading and spatial file management à la MacOS 9.

  Decently cool and interesting, but not worth the hour-long read IMHO.

• by pengaru on 9/9/23, 10:32 PM

  That's quite the wall of text I won't be reading...