The main point here, is that we where able to do everything we needed for a fraction of the ressources (cpu/ram/hard drive) that we need today, to do exacty the same things... This is a regression, not a progress...
@@robotron1236 And is this added cpu / ram / hard drive capacity solely used for improved security ? I really don't think so. Just look at the chat apps like slack, they use an entire chrome stack (electron) just by pure lasiness to make a native version
@@robotron1236 You know that you can do secure software without using so much ressources ? The bloat that we actually have is not because of security, it's just because dev time cost far more that hardware...
SBC systems have been bringing some of that back, and IOT stuff, both because more developers are learning on somewhat less robust excess resources, and because battery life necessitates more efficiency, like throttling the clock. Cell phones are still powerful machines compared to anything in the 90s, but also usually significantly less than a typical modern desktop.
Desktop computing hit its height in 2009. Windows 7 with aero, Mac OS snow leopard with no weird gestures, and gnome 2 with compviz No cell phones in window 8 or gnome 3 or windows 10 start menus, no full screen sized translucent vr optimized windows calculator etc. Everything is assuming we want a cell phone or tablet on a desktop. Also flat looks and anti skuemorphism with all blinding white white or black no shadows and no effects. Colors and layering effects have been removed. Multitasking like stacking apps in gnome 3 gone. Taskbar features in Windows removed. It’s all going backwards for no reason
Agree on everything but not really about "assuming we want mobile on desktop". In my opinion, mobile UIs have just equally gone worse, and most of those "mobile friendly" changes are not good in mobile either.
ngl though the windows mobile metro menu was actually one of the best and most unique interfaces by microsoft that time when they truly did something different fr
I blame software companies for hiring web developers to work on GUI design. And the inefficiency and bloat of software is also caused by web developers. Everything is HTML, CSS, and JS to them even when they are not using them. Not to mention that many desktop applications are written in HTML/JS while they shouldn't be.
Its so weird that (especially in GNOME and Plasma) nowadays everything gets hidden behind some hamburger menu, or that everything has GIANT buttons/icons. Like seriously, on desktop computers we have the precision of the mouse input and big screens with much space, why do we waste so much space for nothing???
@@moussaadem7933yeah "removing" the """clutter""" by hiding everything behind one button that includes the same """clutter""" and introducing even more clutter, by cramping everything into one space. We had menu bars, what was wrong with them? On a desktop computer we have enough space for that
@@vileliveArt school graduates? Are you kidding me? 20 years ago they actually had good artwork, these days they've backtracked to silhouettes as though we live in the 1700s.
The trend now is to remove features, or hide them, just to not scare people too much. like this is the last frontier, to gain the last remaining customers. I miss the old days when computers were exciting, when I could get a cd-rom bundled with a magazine with tons of cool sharewares and games demo. Now we just need internet to do things through an app that is just in fact a web page running code somewhere else needing weekly updates that change nothing then one days it just stops working because your device is too old. I feel like a grumpy old man lol
"an app that is just in fact a web page running code somewhere else needing weekly updates that change nothing then one days it just stops working because your device is too old" Perfect encapsulation of the state of today's tech.
I tell anyone who will listen that most of the upgrade treadmill we're all stuck with exists purely to serve the aesthetic sense of insular devs. As you point out, after the endless rewrites very little has changed. Despite the never ending grind of new layers of abstraction, new backends, new frontends, new API's, and new paradigms, software isn't any faster or easier to write now than it was 20 years ago. Every time a project throws away 100,000 lines of code to rewrite itself in a way that has less flexibility and consumes more resources, it never takes less time to mature than last time, and users are put through it for _nothing_. All I want is for wide recognition that these practices aren't working! Devs teams aren't getting smaller. Software isn't being developed any more rapidly. User interferences are largely unchanged or worse. All that's changed is that all of this takes 10 times the computing resources than it did at the start.
Maybe we should just do what Mathematics did, stick to one syntax, and ban all the others, aka, ban all programming languages, except for 1. Now fight to the death which one, I'll be retiring from programming. If I wouldn't be retiring I would only claim that I shouldn't be JS or PHP, any other is fine for me, but as I'm retiring, it literally doesn't matter anymore.
Let's not forget that operating systems on things like phones have failed to even meet the basic standards of your 1990's examples. It's easier to find a file on a 30+ year old OS than on a current phone.
Seriously, it's a motivation thing. Most people complain but continue to buy and use the same broken stuff. My friends and family complain about things they can change, and don't change them, so here we are
Your absolutely right. My teenage son didnt know how to use a C64 when I first showed him it. When I showed him my Amiga for the first time he said "it is like a normal computer". He felt comfortable with it. The desktop paradigm felt like his modern system. This is evidence that not a lot has changed since then.
When I showed my then girlfriend, now wife my Amiga she was like "Oh! Well, why didn't this win over Windows?" She'd been a Mac girl all her adult life and immediately recognized how the Amiga looked and worked.
The graphical metaphors of Xerox PARC were extended to their maximum usefulness decades ago. Technological innovation is hill climbing, and nobody is willing to go back down and look for another hill, even if it might be a mountain.
There are some improvemens that at least I didn't come across them over 20 years ago or earlier. For example image and video thumbnails in file browsers. Keyboard controlled launchers like Krunner which can handle file indexing. Gestures when working with touchpads.
this is exactly images as file icons. and this function can use some libraries for reading info from metatags, which already contains in file. this is not some new xperience.
I agree. I thought this too for a long time. An 8086 PC with 640K RAM running Arachne in DOS could download files faster on a 10mbps Ethernet connection than my Steam Deck can locally download a game from my PC sharing the same Wi-Fi 6 router. It's not necessarily that real progress isn't happening, it's that pretty progress is appreciated more now. Steam is written in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Steam uses node.js modules to handle HTTP/2 data transfers, of course it's dog slow, even on a high-end PC. Also why is it using HTTP on a LAN? Because it's what the devs know and understand. (Or, it's all they know.) Git works far harder to consolidate complex structures of distributed versioned data, which is effectively what Steam is, and yet it's a champ. (Actually, even using CVS I had less corruption, too.) We're facing an age where development is facilitating the web developers with hammers, where everything is a nail, and the majority of consumers who excuse gaping faults as long as the content is unboxed in a (vapidly) pretty way. Apps no longer focus on performance and functionality, because it's been found that being pretty excuses it.
To be fair, Linus published Linux in 1991 and Git in 2005, so the most significant open-source projects have been around for a pretty long time. However, I agree that FOSS coverage has improved, and we've gone a long way from unverifiable closed-source "freeware" of the early 2000's, but there's still a long way to go before software becomes properly free. There is much corporate governance that needs to go before we can claim to be "free as in freedom".
Search, smart folders, file previews, and generally more advanced metadata sorting are things I would definitely hate to do without, but yeah, they figured all of that out in the early 00's.
I couldn't use Vim motion keys on my browser a decade ago. I can go to any web page, press F, type a letter, and I can click on any link or go to any text input or form without using my mouse. Another example: Microsoft used to have doc and xls formats. If I wanted to create Word templates to automatically fill in, I would have to find a way to read the closed format. With docx and xlsx, the documents are basically zip files with xml files which I can load and manipulate at will, without the need of any proprietary software.
All the innovations after 2020 were for optimising the most brain-dead doomscrolling, to maximise corporate profits without providing any tangible value to the users.
Its irritating how browsers have no SSL-disabled fallback option. Sure, have a "not secure" banner at the top, but don't bombard me with errors and crash.
In Tron Legacy, near the beginning of the movie, Encom release a new version of their expensive OS. One developer asks what's new in this version, the head says nothing, it just looks nicer.
The Mac Plus had one mega of RAM, I remember well using it as a kid and up until today I am sure no system was ever as ahead of it's time. The general workflow on my laptop today, with 32gb of RAM is pretty much the same. Little has been added to word processing since then, for instance. We figured it all out even before the Mac Plus, most of the work since has been adjusting details.
In my last moments of using Windows, I had the task manager open 24-7 so I could see and shut down "Microsoft Compatibility Telemetry" immediately, on principle. Updates are like an escape room, chasing down anomalies in settings that were rewired without approval. Hit the window key, and start typing the program you want to run, and watch the start menu start giving you stock quotes and web search results! Wonder what's becoming "Easier"? Think the file manager is just a file manager? A closed source program, on a system that constantly exchanges information with company servers, needs an "Update"? Anyone with "Security" in their job description, dealing with Windows, has to be a complete fool. Sorry, I've got to boot an old Windows computer today and it feels worse than having an appointment for dental work.
After using a tiling window manager (daily) for the past 3 years, Im struggling with the justification of going back to a full-blown desktop environment. When I look back at my time on regular desktop environments over the past 30 years, I agree, not much has changed with the core paradigm. Try using your desktop during an internet outage and it will hit you pretty quickly that the OS is pretty much just there to bootstrap the browser (for most people). Most people could probably survive is a fullscreen webbrowser, no desktop.
That’s basically what ChromeOS was designed as, a web browser on a bare minimum system. Chromebooks are the 21st century version of thin clients and dumb text terminals that connected to a timesharing mainframe or server.
I couldn't. I need my 20 separate file explorer windows spread out over multiple monitors and my multiple instances of notepad (aside from a Notepad++ instance), and I especially need Task Manager to kill badly behaved applications and also taskbar pinning to quickly relaunch said applications.
This is JUST reinventing 'the kitchen sink' ... very hard to improve - it takes me three months to go through the customisations to get the desk top to work FOR me - each update just randomly moves features.
I said this in my last video, I installed Office 95 on the Libretto 50ct and I said that you can do 99% of the things that most people do on Office just fine on Office 95 and even older versions. Office has changed very little in the last 30 years!
Alan Kay says we haven’t seen the computer Revolution yet It’s all still stuck in 1972 Until we get out of the vertical apps mindset, we will not have the computer Revolution
Looking at those old programs, I love how everything looks so defined. There are solid lines between the elements, a nice contrast that makes things easy to read. You can see the same in Windows pre-XP, or early versions of KDE and Gnome. There was this visual clarity that's kind of lost now. Modern systems are full of gradients, transparencies, flatness, low contrast, pointless subtleties that just make everything less readable. So in many ways usability got worse since those days.
I haven't gotten through the whole video yet, but as I watch the classic Mac OS desktop, I feel that we haven't really progressed much since then because honestly the paradigm just works. It's not like there haven't been attempts to re-invent the wheel to differing degrees of success or failure (Windows 8 and Canonical's Unity Desktop anyone?) or VR based hand Gestures, I just think that what we have is essentially perfection and the desire to change it just isn't there.
In the late 90s, I was running slackware with fvwm95 and it was fast and snappy, especially compared to the lackluster Windows 3.1. In many ways, we've gone backwards. Though I don't miss having to edit modelines.
We're seeing an intentional hiding of functionality and outright removal of functionality in our tools. To make it worse buttons don't look like buttons scroll bars hide when not in use and when they are shown they turn into a pencil thin mess and to top it all off everybody's obsessed with low contrast design making text and icons often very hard to read against their now shortcoming monochrome dark and light modes. Get rid of flat designs put bevels on things and make them look clickable again add color to your menu bars.
Yeah, thanks for the direction. Every time I remembered by Amiga from 30 Years back, I had a strange feeling that I could not grasp in words until now. I used on my Amiga WB 3.1with few expansions during early and mid 90's and the usage of the Operation Systems just did not changed since then. If they ported it to new hardware and provide it with current protocols and programs, nobody would guess it is over 30 Years old :D
Not only is Gnome's file browser not doing anything new. It has actually lost features. It used to be able to brows anything. local file systems and networked file systems. SMB and NFS and others.
@@moussaadem7933 Can it do Split-View dual and horizontal? Preview any kind of file? Filter by Regex? Flatview? Custom columns? Thumbnail any file format? Custom context menus? Custom menus? Custom buttons? Does it handle Tabs, vertical or horizontal? Can it mass rename, browse and add/delete from archives and ISOs? Can it copy selected file names or paths to clipboard (from both views)? Does it have a very compact list view for files instead of bloated thumbnaily look? Can it steplessly zoom into thumbnails? Does it have an advanced search? Can it exclude network filesystems mounted to the local filesystem when searching? Can it sort hidden files and folders after the regular ones? Does it have alternating row colors or custom colors for specific files? Can you rate an MP3 directly from the rating column? Does it have a meta data edit panel? Does it have a manual sort mode? A scripting API? Anything a professional user can make use of? o) The only file manager being an evolution is Directory Opus on Windows these days (started back on the Amiga), it ticks all the boxes and much more. It's one of few applications which actually grow and not start from scratch with half the features every 10 years. Just my 2 cents of course.. o)
I browse my network in Nautilus all the time, not sure where you've been lol I'm also a daily Gnome user, so I'm used to the changes and how they move things around. It's easier for normal people to use but has a lot for advanced users as well.
Nautilus actually can browse more things than ever; SFTP, NFS, SMB, FTP/FTPS, MTP/PTP, etc. If you don't install the required components (which are part of the default GNOME distribution) then those options don't appear, but that's on you. 😂
Re: File browsers I still MUCH prefer midnight commander. The future is terminals. I actually *like* sc over gui spreadsheets. GUI file browsers always screw up the basic tree structure. I hated the PMSHELL (OS/2) as well, once the novelty wore of it just slowed me down.
Nice video. I was planning on doing a similar review of Amiga's workbench 3.1 from 1993. It even works at 1080p with a graphics card. It won't be as polished as the Mac from 2000 and to be fair, wordprocessors and spreadsheets got a little better after the Amiga died. But for the OS and GUI itself it's as you say, "does it have any significant functionality that you use every day?" I think the biggest improvement since 2000 is search on the desktop, which all of these file managers now have built in. First searching by name alone, then searching within the files themselves and then making that perform well enough to be usable. Funnily, going back to these simpler times and OSs, the thing I actually miss like having an arm cut off, is scroll wheel compatibility in the OS and applications.
I believe that a part of the reason why KDE and GNOME (and every distro, desktop environment, and other projects) advertise basic features so much is to signal to potential new users (current Mac and Win users) that things in the dreaded Linuxistan aren't as bad and complicated as they might think. Linux is always portrayed as this complicated thing that does everything differently and is at the same time super powerful and lacking compatibility and basic regard for the user experience and comfort.
Some functionality I would have liked to have seen in Windows, before I switched to Linux, namely searching for text within files. I don't use it everyday, but I use it often enough, I can't live without it.
production lines of corporate "excellence." Demand your programmers and UX designers to come up with bigger and better to please the higher ups and hint at more profits for 30 years. Infinite growth. Then those programers and designers look at each other, knowing that it's already feature complete... So thus moving things around it goes. No QA, too expensive of a department, or just fill them with Yes-men. And then all you get is this over and over. It's not really surprising. I just hate dealing with it as an end user. I get no say.
I might believe you if Open Source if did better, but they don't. Everyone makes the same UI over and over again. Nah, scratch that, most open source software manage to make it much worse, with so much clutter, 300 menu items and 100 toolbar buttons, and zero QA, lol. 😂
My desktop has improved quite a lot... it has more RGB. In terms of Office features, I have to say I got pissed at PowerPoint 12-ish years ago. As a kid, I used to use the zero-second auto-transition delay between slides to very quickly make flipbook animations, but after... I think it was the 2007 or 2010 version, PowerPoint's "0-second" transition swapped to maybe 0.9 of a second, which was useless to me. I didn't want to set up involved "animation panes", I just wanted to slap some shapes on the slide, copy, paste, move them a bit, copy, paste, move them a bit more, etc. I will say that I really like what Pop!_OS has done, for instance incorporating a calculator in the quick-search bar. In other words, I can just hit the super button and type "=pi" and "3.1415(etc)" shows up in the search results within microseconds. No need to open a calculator, and there are a number of features like that built into it.
AV1 makes it worth new hardware to encode to it. You can encode UHD to the same bitrate commonly used for 160p and it looks a little better than okay; on a FHD display, I don't have a UHD.
Change for the sake of change is almost universally bad. Change is good when it's actually change - but UI design mostly didn't need to change after three year 2000 or so outside of minor tweaks. I feel far less productive on modern systems because I'm always navigating around 20+ years of "change" where things are moved around, or the graphics made less visually clear, or the new trend of having tiny and hidden scrollbars that make it physically hard to navigate at times... Desktops reached maturity. It should have been allowed to evolve slowly as actual needs arose, but commercial and popular success both generally depend on a feeling of novelty.
That's actually a disadvantage rather than advantage. There's so many ways of doing the same thing that people don't know which is the best and thus can't have a standard. The reason people stick to Windows and Mac is because of simplicity and familiarity.
Windows NAS MacOS may be chasing fads (at time) but Linux distros are largely copying them. There is little true innovation outside of keyboard-centric features like window tiling and navigation. Although this is a niche solution for mostly developers. Everyone else has moved onto mouse-centric navigation and control.
Y'know what's better and new and actually useful for browsing files? The "file size" view in Konqueror. Does KDE suggest Konqueror as its primary file manager? Nope, it suggests Dolphin. Does Dolphin have file size view? Nope. Does Dolphin have any meaningful advantage over Konqueror? Also nope, it actually has _less_ features, multiple sidebars is also missing. Whyyy?
Yeah, this is why xfce is the best desktop for linux. It does the same thing with a fraction of the resources, tarts faster, has fewer bugs, and has all the functionality.
The peak of window management on Unix was EvilWM. Every windowed environment Windows, Mac , Gnome etc. Seem to think that bloat equals improvement. All you really want is virtual screens, convenient window arrangement & snappy reactions to your actions. The thing impressing me the most with modern computers. Is that you can play a full on 3D game, capture and compress it in real time. I remember in 94 making a 320x256 mpg took way longer than playing it.
since everything is changing now, all the time, 99% of development is just keeping things running in spite of changing dependencies and external elements (new hardware, apis etc).
Glad you mentioned Norton... those tools were fast and capable. Tbh, I was happy with win7 (with aero switched off). But then again I grew up with Sunview as my main gui.
The only file browsing improvement I have noticed is in Haiku OS, you can rightclick on a folder and browse to subfolders quickly, other than that I can not think of any improvements from Win98 and forward, other than image previews, that was quite handy
22:12 When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone in 2007, he said “we figured it out with computers 20 years ago!” with the GUI & mouse when talking about revolutionary input devices. He mentioned the mouse on Mac, iPod click wheel, and multitouch on iPhone. His argument for one big touch screen was why make more hardware buttons when we can draw virtual buttons on screen. iOS is just a touch screen optimized version of Mac OS X, but with a launcher and a horrible file manager. They only relatively recently stopped requiring the NS prefixes leftover from 30-year-old NeXTstep APIs.
The biggest crime of iOS (and modern MacOS) is that they're over-optimised for average people with zero technical knowledge -- people who have no reason to ever use a "file manager", people who don't want to know that "files" or "directories" even exist at all.
What amazes me most about the Apple Vision Pro and "VisionOS" is that it's basically just 1984 MacOS floating in your living room with a translucent frosted glass skin. Was making flat computer windows from 1984 float in the air Apple's best idea they could come up with for that hardware? Talk about disappointing.
The biggest improvements in modern desktop environments are hardware support and universal search (Krunner, tofu, etc) - aside from that everything else has been pretty much static.
Honestly, I'd rather use that version of Office. If MS was smart, they'd strip down Office to something like that, call it "Focus Edition" or something similar, and I guarantee people would love it.
Is there anything left to improve? Pretty sure at this time we tried everything - taskbars, on top, bottom, sideways, multiple desktops, furling and unfurling windows, panes, cascading, in the end everything is kinda samey. Another thing devs are dumbing the ui down, or turning it into a click fest.
Every category of product reaches a technological optimum, then just churns endlessly with eye candy or cost reduction. Examples: 1949 Sunbeam Radiant Toaster. Electric guitars: 1954 Fender Stratocaster & Gibson Les Paul. Amps: 1965 Marshall Plexi & Fender Blackface. Word processor: 1989 Word Perfect 5.1 (DOS). I remember the wheel of reincarnation being invoked in my computer science textbooks in the 1970's.
The more things change…the more they stay the same. The paradigms have been set from the 90s. As Microsoft learned with Win8 trying to change it causes massive backlash. In order to keep selling they have to force deprication and slap on a new coat of paint.
Thank you for this, gives me some hope back and the feeling I'm not alone! o) Modern Desktops are hyped for basically nothing, like KDE6 release.. man, we already had that 30 years back and better. I agree! o) Same thing is for many other applications on Linux especially.. ImageViewer? FileManager? DiskPartitioner? TaskBar? Each distro creates it's own useless variant of the same thing, far from being any better than what was available back then.
Mr. Lunduke, what features would you like to see? How much different do desktop environments need to be from their current state to improve functionality? What additional features could improve the scenario? I do agree with your points, but I don't see any solutions provided in the video.
On the remark - I need to click more time to get things done That UX can be called FPS UX - First Person Shoot User Experience On not improving - well, not only they don't improve, but they made it worse. So worse that even IT people are complaining on how unusable the UI has become
I actually just completely abandoned all GUI file browsers entirely. I've abandoned GUI code editors as well, and I'm using NeoVIM for editing all text files, and I only use ZSH to interact with my file system now. Honestly, my entire desktop environment is just a pretty presentation layer for my terminal emulator and web browser, and not really much else.
I mean, have the things that we WANT TO DO WITH desktop computers changed that much? Necessity is the mother of invention and I'm not sure if the way that the things we do with computers have changed so significantly as to even allow for big changes to how we interface with computers. The biggest change to computing was the introduction of handheld touchsreen devices but that is outside the scope of "computer desktops". Not sure if it's a bad thing but I think chances are good that innovation in desktop computing is basically dead. Improvements will be incremental and probably mostly in the back end.
The last meaningful improvement on the desktop was that Mac OS extension to enable option + spacebar search and/or launch. Everything else just added bloat so we switched measuring minimum desktop required RAM in Mb to multiples of *Gb* without any *new* functionality (dang, still have HDDs around smaller than one of my RAM sticks ATM :D).
They made it 'easier' in KDE by single click to open, but i changed it back to double click so i can actually select stuff lol. What EVERY linux desktop needs is a "create shortcut" equivalent in the context link that does what it says on the tin.
I will never forgive browser developers for removing the ability to do math in the url on pc. It was so damn handy to just input some simple equation and get the result without having to search it and hope the search engine you're using supports math expressions
Like cars. Since the 1990s, not much has REALLY changed. Its evolution rather then revolution. There are some nice things (like the "aero snap" feature since W7) that are indeed very useful, but nothing major.
I think the more driving force behind it is the business and security incentives to isolate every program into its own little bubble of memory. Both to prevent attack vectors, but also keep users from doing uncontrolled things with their software that could be sold as an ecosystem feature
I agree that desktop environment innovation is stalled and has only incrementally changed since MacOS 7 era designs. When did adding tabs to a file browser get considered as innovation? Touch and phone tablet UIs are having a small impact, but it’s not adding much value. I’d say the biggest real innovation in years is Continuity (seamlessly working across multiple devices). And AI seems like it might bring something truly new.
Amiga Workbench 2.x was a delight to interact with compared to anything else available at the time. As far as file browsing goes, I’d like to see de-dupe and version control built-in; maybe that already exists and I’m not aware of it.
13:27 It doesn't help either that back then a fully feature complete word processor could work with less than 10MB of RAM while today a basic text editor like mousepad will eat easily over 50MB.
A functionality that got added in the OO's is previews. Previews in file browsing are helping so much, it is unreal. I can't not browse without previews. I do think that my file browser is much better than what I had in the 00's, I can do a lot more, browse quicker (hardware probably a factor here), use less clicks, etc. Dolphin provides an easy to see information panel on the right, a favorites place on the left, an advanced search bar at the top that allows me to look within files for keywords (something still missing from Windows Explorer), tagging, and a whole lot more. Maybe it is my age, but the few times I had to use an older computer (older than the OO's), I found it to be awkward and unwieldy to use, much less try and find something.
@@JeffreyJibsonSo I googled Norton Desktop and Central Point Desktop (as that gave more and better results than PC Tools Desktop) and I couldn't find anything on this. It was not discussed in the few web pages I found on this topic, nor did the screenshots that were available, rare as they were, showcase anything like that. You might be right, but for how big of a deal it was when windows introduced it, I find it surprising that nobody mentioned it for these 2 programs.
Yes, thank you, I felt the same way lately. And also that I would love if at least someone would try something actually new and crazy just for the fun of it. I think there is another perspective on this topic. The number of people using regularly a computer, for work and especially at home, increased a lot during the late 90s and 2000s. People who were not using computers since they were little and Amiga Workbench times, people with very different motivations to use a computer desktop. And I found, those people do not want a changing DE. They consider it unnecessary hustle. To me, it seems I can switch between MacOS, Windows, Plasma, Gnome without too much thinking about it and everything seems almost the same. But for other people, they experience the differences as big. And I think DE developers know that, especially the big ones, Windows and Mac, and they do exactly that. They only change as little as possible to not confuse their average users. And on one hand, this is fine and DE developers should just say that they did only few changes. On the other side, this is such an innovation killer. And with this, I am especially grumpy against Gnome and KDE who would have an easier time just to try new things as the open projects they are.
Windows moved the menu to the main application window. Updates beyond that point have mostly been shuffling stuff around and aesthetics. And they removed desktop functionality in win 11 after a rewrite that even made explorer slower.
Gnome in particular is taking something that worked just fine before like a file browser and removing half of its features and calling it progress. I bet that MacOS 9 file browser from the 90s has more features than Nautilus in Gnome 45 today.
I'm not sure what the takaway lesson is -- is it that there is nothing to innovate so they shouldn't pretend there is, or that there is a lot that can and should be done, but isn't being done, or that it is going backward, or changing but not improving, or what?
From a practical standpoint, website have actually regressed quite a bit. Even if a browser can technically support using a feature, modern websites can't do all the experimental interesting things that you used to back in the geocities days because you'll get sued for lack of accessibility if you do things that screen readers can't understand. 90% of the features of a modern web browser aren't actually possible to use in a practical sense because of the requirement to support mobile devices and screen readers. I was looking at some old websites the other day and seeing just how much more unique and interesting they were than modern websites and realizing that even if you wanted to make a site like that, legally you can't do that anymore.
I think that the same can be said about the automobile and just about any other technology that was revolutionary when it was first created: all improvements post-revolution are incremental. It is just how it goes.
My workflow has vastly improved from 20 years ago. Maybe I just know more keyboard shortcuts and have organized all of my directories in a way that's more productive, but moving files is fast, copying files is fast, selecting what I want seems easier, changing settings seems to make more sense, rarely do I ever come across a file that has been corrupted. Clipboards now have searchable trees for cutting and pasting. I never save different versions of the same file as "draft 1, draft 2, draft 240322" because I have versioning built in. We have WinV in Windows and Alfred in MacOS. For Linux we have essentially "all the options" with the ability to have things fixed in active projects the next day. To be honest, I think that you're just... wrong... on this take. I respect what you're getting at because I do think that things could be improved. For example, when i do a windows search for a file and get a result, I'm not sure how to just copy that file immediately with a kb shortcut to be pasted into an email. My preference would be to never have to drag and drop anything ever.
Standard libraries have improved. I remember when winmodems and webcams were a nightmare under linux. Far more stuff "just works" rather than requiring driver disks. I was Netware certified, where we had to load different parts of the network stack manually and separately and getting a CD to work required some expertise. Doom ran with SPX but not IP. File browsing hasn't improved because its feature-complete, though we have added excellent preview features. Security has greatly improved while hiding the massive increase in complexity required to make that work so you can still just browse files. We can now treat google as if it were a local floppy. But, yes, user requirements and solutions haven't changed a great deal. Improvements have been added to paid-for tools, not the OS and often revolve around integration rather than new features. Desktop video conferencing anyone?
The main point here, is that we where able to do everything we needed for a fraction of the ressources (cpu/ram/hard drive) that we need today, to do exacty the same things... This is a regression, not a progress...
Please keep using old operating systems 🤣🤣🤣 They're still vulnerable to the simplest exploits!
@@robotron1236 And is this added cpu / ram / hard drive capacity solely used for improved security ? I really don't think so. Just look at the chat apps like slack, they use an entire chrome stack (electron) just by pure lasiness to make a native version
@@robotron1236 You know that you can do secure software without using so much ressources ?
The bloat that we actually have is not because of security, it's just because dev time cost far more that hardware...
came here to say this
SBC systems have been bringing some of that back, and IOT stuff, both because more developers are learning on somewhat less robust excess resources, and because battery life necessitates more efficiency, like throttling the clock. Cell phones are still powerful machines compared to anything in the 90s, but also usually significantly less than a typical modern desktop.
Desktop computing hit its height in 2009. Windows 7 with aero, Mac OS snow leopard with no weird gestures, and gnome 2 with compviz
No cell phones in window 8 or gnome 3 or windows 10 start menus, no full screen sized translucent vr optimized windows calculator etc.
Everything is assuming we want a cell phone or tablet on a desktop.
Also flat looks and anti skuemorphism with all blinding white white or black no shadows and no effects. Colors and layering effects have been removed. Multitasking like stacking apps in gnome 3 gone. Taskbar features in Windows removed. It’s all going backwards for no reason
Agree on everything but not really about "assuming we want mobile on desktop". In my opinion, mobile UIs have just equally gone worse, and most of those "mobile friendly" changes are not good in mobile either.
ngl though the windows mobile metro menu was actually one of the best and most unique interfaces by microsoft that time when they truly did something different fr
I found Compiz so exciting! I miss it.
I agree. Plasma has made me use gnome/mate. Which is sad.
I blame software companies for hiring web developers to work on GUI design. And the inefficiency and bloat of software is also caused by web developers. Everything is HTML, CSS, and JS to them even when they are not using them. Not to mention that many desktop applications are written in HTML/JS while they shouldn't be.
feel like UI design is going back ward not forward. They find new way to hide functionality.
And more ways to waste space, while also worsening stability (ie. introducing more bugs).
Its so weird that (especially in GNOME and Plasma) nowadays everything gets hidden behind some hamburger menu, or that everything has GIANT buttons/icons. Like seriously, on desktop computers we have the precision of the mouse input and big screens with much space, why do we waste so much space for nothing???
@@vetrixfx9264 too much unnecessary clutter, keep the interface clean from the less used commands
@@moussaadem7933yeah "removing" the """clutter""" by hiding everything behind one button that includes the same """clutter""" and introducing even more clutter, by cramping everything into one space.
We had menu bars, what was wrong with them? On a desktop computer we have enough space for that
@@vileliveArt school graduates? Are you kidding me? 20 years ago they actually had good artwork, these days they've backtracked to silhouettes as though we live in the 1700s.
The trend now is to remove features, or hide them, just to not scare people too much. like this is the last frontier, to gain the last remaining customers.
I miss the old days when computers were exciting, when I could get a cd-rom bundled with a magazine with tons of cool sharewares and games demo. Now we just need internet to do things through an app that is just in fact a web page running code somewhere else needing weekly updates that change nothing then one days it just stops working because your device is too old.
I feel like a grumpy old man lol
"an app that is just in fact a web page running code somewhere else needing weekly updates that change nothing then one days it just stops working because your device is too old"
Perfect encapsulation of the state of today's tech.
it is true, broth.
I tell anyone who will listen that most of the upgrade treadmill we're all stuck with exists purely to serve the aesthetic sense of insular devs.
As you point out, after the endless rewrites very little has changed. Despite the never ending grind of new layers of abstraction, new backends, new frontends, new API's, and new paradigms, software isn't any faster or easier to write now than it was 20 years ago.
Every time a project throws away 100,000 lines of code to rewrite itself in a way that has less flexibility and consumes more resources, it never takes less time to mature than last time, and users are put through it for _nothing_.
All I want is for wide recognition that these practices aren't working! Devs teams aren't getting smaller. Software isn't being developed any more rapidly. User interferences are largely unchanged or worse. All that's changed is that all of this takes 10 times the computing resources than it did at the start.
Maybe we should just do what Mathematics did, stick to one syntax, and ban all the others, aka, ban all programming languages, except for 1. Now fight to the death which one, I'll be retiring from programming.
If I wouldn't be retiring I would only claim that I shouldn't be JS or PHP, any other is fine for me, but as I'm retiring, it literally doesn't matter anymore.
Maybe we should do the same to CPU, ban all architectures except for one.
agent smith in the matrix said it all: 1999, the peak of the civilization
It really was. Music, Movies, Hardware, Computer Software, everything. Even me, I was at my peak.
Let's not forget that operating systems on things like phones have failed to even meet the basic standards of your 1990's examples. It's easier to find a file on a 30+ year old OS than on a current phone.
Seriously, it's a motivation thing. Most people complain but continue to buy and use the same broken stuff. My friends and family complain about things they can change, and don't change them, so here we are
Your absolutely right. My teenage son didnt know how to use a C64 when I first showed him it. When I showed him my Amiga for the first time he said "it is like a normal computer". He felt comfortable with it. The desktop paradigm felt like his modern system. This is evidence that not a lot has changed since then.
When I showed my then girlfriend, now wife my Amiga she was like "Oh! Well, why didn't this win over Windows?" She'd been a Mac girl all her adult life and immediately recognized how the Amiga looked and worked.
A hefty lot *has* changed since then. To worse.
The graphical metaphors of Xerox PARC were extended to their maximum usefulness decades ago. Technological innovation is hill climbing, and nobody is willing to go back down and look for another hill, even if it might be a mountain.
That's a wonderful metaphor, I must try to remember it.
AAjax, are you related to AAron? ;)
There are some improvemens that at least I didn't come across them over 20 years ago or earlier. For example image and video thumbnails in file browsers. Keyboard controlled launchers like Krunner which can handle file indexing. Gestures when working with touchpads.
this is exactly images as file icons. and this function can use some libraries for reading info from metatags, which already contains in file. this is not some new xperience.
We need a video on why so much work to make OSs compatible with different architectures - yet no work on a universal file system
I agree.
I thought this too for a long time. An 8086 PC with 640K RAM running Arachne in DOS could download files faster on a 10mbps Ethernet connection than my Steam Deck can locally download a game from my PC sharing the same Wi-Fi 6 router.
It's not necessarily that real progress isn't happening, it's that pretty progress is appreciated more now. Steam is written in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Steam uses node.js modules to handle HTTP/2 data transfers, of course it's dog slow, even on a high-end PC. Also why is it using HTTP on a LAN? Because it's what the devs know and understand. (Or, it's all they know.)
Git works far harder to consolidate complex structures of distributed versioned data, which is effectively what Steam is, and yet it's a champ. (Actually, even using CVS I had less corruption, too.)
We're facing an age where development is facilitating the web developers with hammers, where everything is a nail, and the majority of consumers who excuse gaping faults as long as the content is unboxed in a (vapidly) pretty way.
Apps no longer focus on performance and functionality, because it's been found that being pretty excuses it.
One improvement: more FOSS software. While still not a majority, there's a bigger community around the free software movement now.
FOSS, as we all know, has perfect and consistent ui design
@@TheCatherineCC don't care tbh.
@@matthewrease2376cared so little you replied lol
FOSS won't help. Look at GNOME (just as an example)
To be fair, Linus published Linux in 1991 and Git in 2005, so the most significant open-source projects have been around for a pretty long time.
However, I agree that FOSS coverage has improved, and we've gone a long way from unverifiable closed-source "freeware" of the early 2000's, but there's still a long way to go before software becomes properly free. There is much corporate governance that needs to go before we can claim to be "free as in freedom".
Search, smart folders, file previews, and generally more advanced metadata sorting are things I would definitely hate to do without, but yeah, they figured all of that out in the early 00's.
DOS Navigator and Total Commander are still more comfortable than all these mouse aiming games.
I couldn't use Vim motion keys on my browser a decade ago. I can go to any web page, press F, type a letter, and I can click on any link or go to any text input or form without using my mouse.
Another example: Microsoft used to have doc and xls formats. If I wanted to create Word templates to automatically fill in, I would have to find a way to read the closed format. With docx and xlsx, the documents are basically zip files with xml files which I can load and manipulate at will, without the need of any proprietary software.
why does this brilliant new docx format lose spaces when opened on another version of Word?
All computer innovations after 2000 were for the web, and all innovations after 2010 were for phones.
All the innovations after 2020 were for optimising the most brain-dead doomscrolling, to maximise corporate profits without providing any tangible value to the users.
Its irritating how browsers have no SSL-disabled fallback option. Sure, have a "not secure" banner at the top, but don't bombard me with errors and crash.
It’s incomprehensible that on windows 11 running on a 4.5GHz 16 core processor it takes 2+ seconds to open file explorer…
In Tron Legacy, near the beginning of the movie, Encom release a new version of their expensive OS. One developer asks what's new in this version, the head says nothing, it just looks nicer.
The Mac Plus had one mega of RAM, I remember well using it as a kid and up until today I am sure no system was ever as ahead of it's time. The general workflow on my laptop today, with 32gb of RAM is pretty much the same. Little has been added to word processing since then, for instance. We figured it all out even before the Mac Plus, most of the work since has been adjusting details.
In my last moments of using Windows, I had the task manager open 24-7 so I could see and shut down "Microsoft Compatibility Telemetry" immediately, on principle. Updates are like an escape room, chasing down anomalies in settings that were rewired without approval. Hit the window key, and start typing the program you want to run, and watch the start menu start giving you stock quotes and web search results! Wonder what's becoming "Easier"? Think the file manager is just a file manager? A closed source program, on a system that constantly exchanges information with company servers, needs an "Update"? Anyone with "Security" in their job description, dealing with Windows, has to be a complete fool. Sorry, I've got to boot an old Windows computer today and it feels worse than having an appointment for dental work.
After using a tiling window manager (daily) for the past 3 years, Im struggling with the justification of going back to a full-blown desktop environment. When I look back at my time on regular desktop environments over the past 30 years, I agree, not much has changed with the core paradigm. Try using your desktop during an internet outage and it will hit you pretty quickly that the OS is pretty much just there to bootstrap the browser (for most people). Most people could probably survive is a fullscreen webbrowser, no desktop.
That’s basically what ChromeOS was designed as, a web browser on a bare minimum system. Chromebooks are the 21st century version of thin clients and dumb text terminals that connected to a timesharing mainframe or server.
I couldn't. I need my 20 separate file explorer windows spread out over multiple monitors and my multiple instances of notepad (aside from a Notepad++ instance), and I especially need Task Manager to kill badly behaved applications and also taskbar pinning to quickly relaunch said applications.
This is JUST reinventing 'the kitchen sink' ... very hard to improve - it takes me three months to go through the customisations to get the desk top to work FOR me - each update just randomly moves features.
Some of these older UI's look sick, don't know why they switched!
Fashion is software too
I said this in my last video, I installed Office 95 on the Libretto 50ct and I said that you can do 99% of the things that most people do on Office just fine on Office 95 and even older versions.
Office has changed very little in the last 30 years!
Alan Kay says we haven’t seen the computer Revolution yet
It’s all still stuck in 1972
Until we get out of the vertical apps mindset, we will not have the computer Revolution
Looking at those old programs, I love how everything looks so defined. There are solid lines between the elements, a nice contrast that makes things easy to read. You can see the same in Windows pre-XP, or early versions of KDE and Gnome. There was this visual clarity that's kind of lost now. Modern systems are full of gradients, transparencies, flatness, low contrast, pointless subtleties that just make everything less readable. So in many ways usability got worse since those days.
I haven't gotten through the whole video yet, but as I watch the classic Mac OS desktop, I feel that we haven't really progressed much since then because honestly the paradigm just works. It's not like there haven't been attempts to re-invent the wheel to differing degrees of success or failure (Windows 8 and Canonical's Unity Desktop anyone?) or VR based hand Gestures, I just think that what we have is essentially perfection and the desire to change it just isn't there.
It stood for Kommon first, a play on Sun's CDE.
It should stand for Kopy because that largely what it is.
In the late 90s, I was running slackware with fvwm95 and it was fast and snappy, especially compared to the lackluster Windows 3.1. In many ways, we've gone backwards. Though I don't miss having to edit modelines.
We're seeing an intentional hiding of functionality and outright removal of functionality in our tools. To make it worse buttons don't look like buttons scroll bars hide when not in use and when they are shown they turn into a pencil thin mess and to top it all off everybody's obsessed with low contrast design making text and icons often very hard to read against their now shortcoming monochrome dark and light modes. Get rid of flat designs put bevels on things and make them look clickable again add color to your menu bars.
But when companies try to "improve" the desktop environment, you end up getting windows 8...
Modern computers can wait and sleep much faster than back then.
Not really. APM back in the old day had pretty much instant wake from sleep.
@detaart you didn't get the joke
@@krccmsitp2884 I guess i didn't
Hey, hey, modern computers can sleep or actively wait on 128 threads across 64 cores in parallel, much more efficiently than back in the 8086 days!
If the companies started being honest now, the whole system will collapse.
Yeah, thanks for the direction. Every time I remembered by Amiga from 30 Years back, I had a strange feeling that I could not grasp in words until now. I used on my Amiga WB 3.1with few expansions during early and mid 90's and the usage of the Operation Systems just did not changed since then.
If they ported it to new hardware and provide it with current protocols and programs, nobody would guess it is over 30 Years old :D
Not only is Gnome's file browser not doing anything new. It has actually lost features. It used to be able to brows anything. local file systems and networked file systems. SMB and NFS and others.
It can still do that, already, for years
@@moussaadem7933 Can it do Split-View dual and horizontal? Preview any kind of file? Filter by Regex? Flatview? Custom columns? Thumbnail any file format? Custom context menus? Custom menus? Custom buttons? Does it handle Tabs, vertical or horizontal? Can it mass rename, browse and add/delete from archives and ISOs? Can it copy selected file names or paths to clipboard (from both views)? Does it have a very compact list view for files instead of bloated thumbnaily look? Can it steplessly zoom into thumbnails? Does it have an advanced search? Can it exclude network filesystems mounted to the local filesystem when searching? Can it sort hidden files and folders after the regular ones? Does it have alternating row colors or custom colors for specific files? Can you rate an MP3 directly from the rating column? Does it have a meta data edit panel? Does it have a manual sort mode? A scripting API? Anything a professional user can make use of? o)
The only file manager being an evolution is Directory Opus on Windows these days (started back on the Amiga), it ticks all the boxes and much more. It's one of few applications which actually grow and not start from scratch with half the features every 10 years. Just my 2 cents of course.. o)
I browse my network in Nautilus all the time, not sure where you've been lol
I'm also a daily Gnome user, so I'm used to the changes and how they move things around. It's easier for normal people to use but has a lot for advanced users as well.
most file browsers can do that, if it doesn't, check if gvfs is installed and working
Nautilus actually can browse more things than ever; SFTP, NFS, SMB, FTP/FTPS, MTP/PTP, etc.
If you don't install the required components (which are part of the default GNOME distribution) then those options don't appear, but that's on you. 😂
Re: File browsers I still MUCH prefer midnight commander. The future is terminals. I actually *like* sc over gui spreadsheets.
GUI file browsers always screw up the basic tree structure. I hated the PMSHELL (OS/2) as well, once the novelty wore of it just slowed me down.
Nice video. I was planning on doing a similar review of Amiga's workbench 3.1 from 1993. It even works at 1080p with a graphics card. It won't be as polished as the Mac from 2000 and to be fair, wordprocessors and spreadsheets got a little better after the Amiga died. But for the OS and GUI itself it's as you say, "does it have any significant functionality that you use every day?"
I think the biggest improvement since 2000 is search on the desktop, which all of these file managers now have built in. First searching by name alone, then searching within the files themselves and then making that perform well enough to be usable.
Funnily, going back to these simpler times and OSs, the thing I actually miss like having an arm cut off, is scroll wheel compatibility in the OS and applications.
Norton Commander! Come back and make browsing files great again!
8:05 Still the darned things can't even render the damn toolbars at 60FPS
The UI of a car hasn't changed much over the years either.
Sure the old ones worked fine, but did they collect your data as comprehensively?
I believe that a part of the reason why KDE and GNOME (and every distro, desktop environment, and other projects) advertise basic features so much is to signal to potential new users (current Mac and Win users) that things in the dreaded Linuxistan aren't as bad and complicated as they might think. Linux is always portrayed as this complicated thing that does everything differently and is at the same time super powerful and lacking compatibility and basic regard for the user experience and comfort.
Some functionality I would have liked to have seen in Windows, before I switched to Linux, namely searching for text within files. I don't use it everyday, but I use it often enough, I can't live without it.
always portrayed... it earned that with 30 years of ui choices
Nothing beats Opus from Amiga
production lines of corporate "excellence."
Demand your programmers and UX designers to come up with bigger and better to please the higher ups and hint at more profits for 30 years. Infinite growth.
Then those programers and designers look at each other, knowing that it's already feature complete... So thus moving things around it goes. No QA, too expensive of a department, or just fill them with Yes-men. And then all you get is this over and over. It's not really surprising. I just hate dealing with it as an end user. I get no say.
I might believe you if Open Source if did better, but they don't. Everyone makes the same UI over and over again. Nah, scratch that, most open source software manage to make it much worse, with so much clutter, 300 menu items and 100 toolbar buttons, and zero QA, lol. 😂
My desktop has improved quite a lot... it has more RGB.
In terms of Office features, I have to say I got pissed at PowerPoint 12-ish years ago. As a kid, I used to use the zero-second auto-transition delay between slides to very quickly make flipbook animations, but after... I think it was the 2007 or 2010 version, PowerPoint's "0-second" transition swapped to maybe 0.9 of a second, which was useless to me. I didn't want to set up involved "animation panes", I just wanted to slap some shapes on the slide, copy, paste, move them a bit, copy, paste, move them a bit more, etc.
I will say that I really like what Pop!_OS has done, for instance incorporating a calculator in the quick-search bar. In other words, I can just hit the super button and type "=pi" and "3.1415(etc)" shows up in the search results within microseconds. No need to open a calculator, and there are a number of features like that built into it.
AV1 makes it worth new hardware to encode to it. You can encode UHD to the same bitrate commonly used for 160p and it looks a little better than okay; on a FHD display, I don't have a UHD.
Change for the sake of change is almost universally bad. Change is good when it's actually change - but UI design mostly didn't need to change after three year 2000 or so outside of minor tweaks.
I feel far less productive on modern systems because I'm always navigating around 20+ years of "change" where things are moved around, or the graphics made less visually clear, or the new trend of having tiny and hidden scrollbars that make it physically hard to navigate at times...
Desktops reached maturity. It should have been allowed to evolve slowly as actual needs arose, but commercial and popular success both generally depend on a feeling of novelty.
19:00 Windows and MacOS are all about chasing look and feel fads. We have so many choices in Linux that we can select and use whatever wr like.
That's actually a disadvantage rather than advantage. There's so many ways of doing the same thing that people don't know which is the best and thus can't have a standard. The reason people stick to Windows and Mac is because of simplicity and familiarity.
Windows NAS MacOS may be chasing fads (at time) but Linux distros are largely copying them. There is little true innovation outside of keyboard-centric features like window tiling and navigation. Although this is a niche solution for mostly developers. Everyone else has moved onto mouse-centric navigation and control.
@@asandax6 They call this "the tyranny of choice." You're never quite sure you picked the "best" thing. The grass is always greener...
Y'know what's better and new and actually useful for browsing files? The "file size" view in Konqueror.
Does KDE suggest Konqueror as its primary file manager? Nope, it suggests Dolphin.
Does Dolphin have file size view? Nope.
Does Dolphin have any meaningful advantage over Konqueror? Also nope, it actually has _less_ features, multiple sidebars is also missing.
Whyyy?
I don't know bro Dolphin is already packed with features. More than anything Gnome can even imagine having.
Yeah, this is why xfce is the best desktop for linux. It does the same thing with a fraction of the resources, tarts faster, has fewer bugs, and has all the functionality.
The peak of window management on Unix was EvilWM. Every windowed environment Windows, Mac , Gnome etc. Seem to think that bloat equals improvement. All you really want is virtual screens, convenient window arrangement & snappy reactions to your actions. The thing impressing me the most with modern computers. Is that you can play a full on 3D game, capture and compress it in real time. I remember in 94 making a 320x256 mpg took way longer than playing it.
Being able to build and run software in containers is insanely useful these days. Imagine going back to the days when we didn't have Linux containers.
since everything is changing now, all the time, 99% of development is just keeping things running in spite of changing dependencies and external elements (new hardware, apis etc).
Changes for sake of change. What could be more frustrating.
We have Agile to thank for that, which became the main development methodology after always-on broadband Internet connections became ubiquitous.
Glad you mentioned Norton... those tools were fast and capable.
Tbh, I was happy with win7 (with aero switched off). But then again I grew up with Sunview as my main gui.
It's almost like we hit the sweet spot. As a comparison, just how much have we changed a car controls since the steering wheel was invented?
The only file browsing improvement I have noticed is in Haiku OS, you can rightclick on a folder and browse to subfolders quickly, other than that I can not think of any improvements from Win98 and forward, other than image previews, that was quite handy
What about jumplists in Windows 7?
22:12 When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone in 2007, he said “we figured it out with computers 20 years ago!” with the GUI & mouse when talking about revolutionary input devices. He mentioned the mouse on Mac, iPod click wheel, and multitouch on iPhone. His argument for one big touch screen was why make more hardware buttons when we can draw virtual buttons on screen. iOS is just a touch screen optimized version of Mac OS X, but with a launcher and a horrible file manager. They only relatively recently stopped requiring the NS prefixes leftover from 30-year-old NeXTstep APIs.
The biggest crime of iOS (and modern MacOS) is that they're over-optimised for average people with zero technical knowledge -- people who have no reason to ever use a "file manager", people who don't want to know that "files" or "directories" even exist at all.
The general design of Windows peaked in 98.
What amazes me most about the Apple Vision Pro and "VisionOS" is that it's basically just 1984 MacOS floating in your living room with a translucent frosted glass skin. Was making flat computer windows from 1984 float in the air Apple's best idea they could come up with for that hardware? Talk about disappointing.
The biggest improvements in modern desktop environments are hardware support and universal search (Krunner, tofu, etc) - aside from that everything else has been pretty much static.
hardware acceleration of system gui exists from vista or compiz
The problems began when we started using html+css+javascript for (almost) literally everything. It's too cumbersome and slow.
"We Improved a feature. Now it does the exact same thing it did the last 10 versions"
OneDrive files on demand was the most important addition to file explorer/GUI in windows 1709
Honestly, I'd rather use that version of Office.
If MS was smart, they'd strip down Office to something like that, call it "Focus Edition" or something similar, and I guarantee people would love it.
Is there anything left to improve?
Pretty sure at this time we tried everything - taskbars, on top, bottom, sideways, multiple desktops, furling and unfurling windows, panes, cascading, in the end everything is kinda samey.
Another thing devs are dumbing the ui down, or turning it into a click fest.
Every category of product reaches a technological optimum, then just churns endlessly with eye candy or cost reduction. Examples: 1949 Sunbeam Radiant Toaster. Electric guitars: 1954 Fender Stratocaster & Gibson Les Paul. Amps: 1965 Marshall Plexi & Fender Blackface. Word processor: 1989 Word Perfect 5.1 (DOS).
I remember the wheel of reincarnation being invoked in my computer science textbooks in the 1970's.
The more things change…the more they stay the same. The paradigms have been set from the 90s. As Microsoft learned with Win8 trying to change it causes massive backlash. In order to keep selling they have to force deprication and slap on a new coat of paint.
Directory Opus on Amiga was a peak of file managers
When I need to find something, I just hit the super key and type the first two letters.
Thank you for this, gives me some hope back and the feeling I'm not alone! o) Modern Desktops are hyped for basically nothing, like KDE6 release.. man, we already had that 30 years back and better. I agree! o) Same thing is for many other applications on Linux especially.. ImageViewer? FileManager? DiskPartitioner? TaskBar? Each distro creates it's own useless variant of the same thing, far from being any better than what was available back then.
It is actually pretty hard to change the way we interact with computers until there is a major change to the computers themselves...
Mr. Lunduke, what features would you like to see? How much different do desktop environments need to be from their current state to improve functionality? What additional features could improve the scenario? I do agree with your points, but I don't see any solutions provided in the video.
On the remark - I need to click more time to get things done
That UX can be called FPS UX - First Person Shoot User Experience
On not improving - well, not only they don't improve, but they made it worse.
So worse that even IT people are complaining on how unusable the UI has become
I actually just completely abandoned all GUI file browsers entirely. I've abandoned GUI code editors as well, and I'm using NeoVIM for editing all text files, and I only use ZSH to interact with my file system now.
Honestly, my entire desktop environment is just a pretty presentation layer for my terminal emulator and web browser, and not really much else.
the thing you need to click on moves 3 times, as pages load in. my favorite
I mean, have the things that we WANT TO DO WITH desktop computers changed that much? Necessity is the mother of invention and I'm not sure if the way that the things we do with computers have changed so significantly as to even allow for big changes to how we interface with computers. The biggest change to computing was the introduction of handheld touchsreen devices but that is outside the scope of "computer desktops".
Not sure if it's a bad thing but I think chances are good that innovation in desktop computing is basically dead. Improvements will be incremental and probably mostly in the back end.
The last meaningful improvement on the desktop was that Mac OS extension to enable option + spacebar search and/or launch. Everything else just added bloat so we switched measuring minimum desktop required RAM in Mb to multiples of *Gb* without any *new* functionality (dang, still have HDDs around smaller than one of my RAM sticks ATM :D).
We need to go back to DR DOS
4DOS
They made it 'easier' in KDE by single click to open, but i changed it back to double click so i can actually select stuff lol. What EVERY linux desktop needs is a "create shortcut" equivalent in the context link that does what it says on the tin.
I will never forgive browser developers for removing the ability to do math in the url on pc. It was so damn handy to just input some simple equation and get the result without having to search it and hope the search engine you're using supports math expressions
Peak UI was late 1990s. Adversarial design. You are not the user, you are the product.
Like cars. Since the 1990s, not much has REALLY changed. Its evolution rather then revolution.
There are some nice things (like the "aero snap" feature since W7) that are indeed very useful, but nothing major.
There's a standard by IBM which very few people know about but
Silently influences all the guis we have today: common user access
I think the more driving force behind it is the business and security incentives to isolate every program into its own little bubble of memory. Both to prevent attack vectors, but also keep users from doing uncontrolled things with their software that could be sold as an ecosystem feature
I agree that desktop environment innovation is stalled and has only incrementally changed since MacOS 7 era designs. When did adding tabs to a file browser get considered as innovation? Touch and phone tablet UIs are having a small impact, but it’s not adding much value. I’d say the biggest real innovation in years is Continuity (seamlessly working across multiple devices). And AI seems like it might bring something truly new.
ai- artificial idiot. it can't to bring something new
9/10 yapping session, very nice👍
Amiga Workbench 2.x was a delight to interact with compared to anything else available at the time. As far as file browsing goes, I’d like to see de-dupe and version control built-in; maybe that already exists and I’m not aware of it.
I still think the rating column in file explorers is the most overlooked thing in the history of the GUI
13:27 It doesn't help either that back then a fully feature complete word processor could work with less than 10MB of RAM while today a basic text editor like mousepad will eat easily over 50MB.
A functionality that got added in the OO's is previews. Previews in file browsing are helping so much, it is unreal. I can't not browse without previews. I do think that my file browser is much better than what I had in the 00's, I can do a lot more, browse quicker (hardware probably a factor here), use less clicks, etc. Dolphin provides an easy to see information panel on the right, a favorites place on the left, an advanced search bar at the top that allows me to look within files for keywords (something still missing from Windows Explorer), tagging, and a whole lot more.
Maybe it is my age, but the few times I had to use an older computer (older than the OO's), I found it to be awkward and unwieldy to use, much less try and find something.
I'm pretty sure that PC Tools or Norton Desktop had preview in their file browser in the early 90s. MS just copied the functionality later.
@@JeffreyJibsonSo I googled Norton Desktop and Central Point Desktop (as that gave more and better results than PC Tools Desktop) and I couldn't find anything on this. It was not discussed in the few web pages I found on this topic, nor did the screenshots that were available, rare as they were, showcase anything like that. You might be right, but for how big of a deal it was when windows introduced it, I find it surprising that nobody mentioned it for these 2 programs.
Yes, thank you, I felt the same way lately. And also that I would love if at least someone would try something actually new and crazy just for the fun of it.
I think there is another perspective on this topic. The number of people using regularly a computer, for work and especially at home, increased a lot during the late 90s and 2000s. People who were not using computers since they were little and Amiga Workbench times, people with very different motivations to use a computer desktop. And I found, those people do not want a changing DE. They consider it unnecessary hustle. To me, it seems I can switch between MacOS, Windows, Plasma, Gnome without too much thinking about it and everything seems almost the same. But for other people, they experience the differences as big. And I think DE developers know that, especially the big ones, Windows and Mac, and they do exactly that. They only change as little as possible to not confuse their average users.
And on one hand, this is fine and DE developers should just say that they did only few changes.
On the other side, this is such an innovation killer. And with this, I am especially grumpy against Gnome and KDE who would have an easier time just to try new things as the open projects they are.
Windows moved the menu to the main application window. Updates beyond that point have mostly been shuffling stuff around and aesthetics. And they removed desktop functionality in win 11 after a rewrite that even made explorer slower.
Gnome in particular is taking something that worked just fine before like a file browser and removing half of its features and calling it progress. I bet that MacOS 9 file browser from the 90s has more features than Nautilus in Gnome 45 today.
I'm not sure what the takaway lesson is -- is it that there is nothing to innovate so they shouldn't pretend there is, or that there is a lot that can and should be done, but isn't being done, or that it is going backward, or changing but not improving, or what?
that there is very little to innovate, what is there to innovate isn't being done, what's being done is regressive.
From a practical standpoint, website have actually regressed quite a bit. Even if a browser can technically support using a feature, modern websites can't do all the experimental interesting things that you used to back in the geocities days because you'll get sued for lack of accessibility if you do things that screen readers can't understand. 90% of the features of a modern web browser aren't actually possible to use in a practical sense because of the requirement to support mobile devices and screen readers.
I was looking at some old websites the other day and seeing just how much more unique and interesting they were than modern websites and realizing that even if you wanted to make a site like that, legally you can't do that anymore.
I think that the same can be said about the automobile and just about any other technology that was revolutionary when it was first created: all improvements post-revolution are incremental. It is just how it goes.
We did have some fun with 3D desktop and gesture support back in windows ME, but that flops badly because of the undercooked ME unstable situation.
The old (standards based) web browsers didn't break. The web did.
My workflow has vastly improved from 20 years ago. Maybe I just know more keyboard shortcuts and have organized all of my directories in a way that's more productive, but moving files is fast, copying files is fast, selecting what I want seems easier, changing settings seems to make more sense, rarely do I ever come across a file that has been corrupted. Clipboards now have searchable trees for cutting and pasting. I never save different versions of the same file as "draft 1, draft 2, draft 240322" because I have versioning built in. We have WinV in Windows and Alfred in MacOS. For Linux we have essentially "all the options" with the ability to have things fixed in active projects the next day. To be honest, I think that you're just... wrong... on this take. I respect what you're getting at because I do think that things could be improved. For example, when i do a windows search for a file and get a result, I'm not sure how to just copy that file immediately with a kb shortcut to be pasted into an email. My preference would be to never have to drag and drop anything ever.
I would love to be able to open and view disc images like .iso, .img, and .vhd, modify and make changes to them with a few clicks.
Standard libraries have improved. I remember when winmodems and webcams were a nightmare under linux. Far more stuff "just works" rather than requiring driver disks. I was Netware certified, where we had to load different parts of the network stack manually and separately and getting a CD to work required some expertise. Doom ran with SPX but not IP.
File browsing hasn't improved because its feature-complete, though we have added excellent preview features. Security has greatly improved while hiding the massive increase in complexity required to make that work so you can still just browse files. We can now treat google as if it were a local floppy.
But, yes, user requirements and solutions haven't changed a great deal. Improvements have been added to paid-for tools, not the OS and often revolve around integration rather than new features. Desktop video conferencing anyone?
The K standing for Kool is the reason I chose KDE Plasma Bryan.