My "Future of Desktop UX (part 2)" talk at #KDE Akademy is now up and it's racking up lots of views. I'm excited people want to discuss this more.
Now I just need someone with Wayland experience to help me prototype this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7AfAcQwLW0
@scottjenson I made a mastodon account just to say that was amazing and exactly the type of thinking I need for my current project. Where can I learn more about how to think creatively in HI space? It's such a battle of Jakob’s Law vs innovation.
@wojang Glad you enjoyed it. I'm afraid there's no single thing I can say to think more creatively other than just Racking up more experience. It's really just a matter of putting in the miles.
@scottjenson experience is the best teacher 100%. Also agreed with your assessment that large companies have a harder time innovating in this space. My thoughts are it's because they have core users that are the recurring customers (b2b or b2c) and are afraid of alienating their base. was surprised to learn you don't want to discuss AI though considering it seems to pollute the internet with rehashed tailwind + shadcn saas apps with threejs bolted on top on some.
@wojang actually I'm very willing to discuss AI. I just treat it as a second order effect. I'm very bullish on ethically trained small language models that can be run locally
@scottjenson @wojang Do you think this will happen anytime soon? I don't see an angle for how to procure enough ethical training data. PleIAs attempts it, but their current models are rather dysfunctional. Other FOSS ones like OLMo use unethical sets such as CommonCrawl and the one containing Github.
Sep 21, 2026, 6:20 AM@scottjenson thanks, here is a link without Google and its tracking https://media.ccc.de/v/kde2026-7-are_we_really_going_to_use_the_same_desktop_ux_forever
@scottjenson holy hell, this is so great. How are you... sorry for this analogy in this context... pushing all the right buttons with me?
@scottjenson thanks! Just rewatched the original from 9 months ago as prep for the new one. Honestly, the first one was great the first time, even better almost a year later.
@scottjenson Care to explain why you included the Omarchy logo (26:04 in the video)?
They're literally a bunch of nazis.
Sep 21, 2026, 8:19 AM@scottjenson extremely interesting prototypes, thanks for your talk!
@scottjenson Thanks so much! I’m always so happy to see people that don’t just copy the status quo or make the borders more rounded and call it a progress. 🤜🤛
@scottjenson The Hookmark app for Mac could serve as a practical example of associative memory augmentation
Sep 21, 2026, 11:24 AM
Great talk!
I'm espectially intrigued with the idea of maintaining clipboard provenance, that immediately feels like it would be useful to me.
The spatial ultrawide concept is neat, though I immediately see the issue of it being kinda physically tedious to drag your cursor over to a window docked off to the side.
I also still think that scrolling tiling window managers are interesting! I remember annoying you a little bit about them after watching that first talk.
On an ultrawide they achieve an effect somewhat similar to your idea: they keep one window in the middle of the physical screen, then having a few secondaries to the sides, and then the less-used windows you can shuffle off-screen entirely.
@hjvt I haven't really explored keyboard shortcuts yet. The linux community LOVES their keyboard combos ;-) I have a few idea on how to do that. There is nothing wrong with coming up with "power user features" as long as they are layered on top of a solid and approachable base for more casual users.
@scottjenson
The big thing that's often bad about keyboard shortcuts is discoverability. It is pretty rare that applications have a sort of "you've pressed one key, here's a list of actions whose chords start with that key" pop-up, or even just a convinient list of all defined shortcuts.
While tiling window management is traditionally all about keyboard-only purism, one of the things that makes `niri` (which is my only window (pardon the pun) into the scrolling WM world) feel nice is that it actually utilises touchpad gestures.
@hjvt Good points. I think we can also take advantage of mouse events, e.g. a super-drag could park a window in that direction. But trackpad gestures are also worth exploring.
@scottjenson scott, that was phenomenal! may I ask how you created these interactive prototypes? were they html/css?
@thibault They were all HTML/CSS but I was using the new Canvas-in-HTML API in the mor recent Chrome build. It allows me to build everything using standard HTML/CSS but then animate it as if it was a standard Canvas object. Very fun new API.
@scottjenson Thanks! Will check it out
@scottjenson
That's the google-free links: https://media.ccc.de/v/kde2026-7-are_we_really_going_to_use_the_same_desktop_ux_forever
Hey Scott, this really inspired me so I put together a demo of an idea I've had for along time. Would love to know your thoughts!
https://youtu.be/Kd9AbKawwhg
@DanFessler sorry for the delay, I'm getting a bit slammed by the replies. This is very cool! This was clearly built with care and lots of attention to detail.
@scottjenson I can imagine! No worries at all!
@scottjenson
Your talk was awesome, those were some really interesting prototypes to be explored
@scottjenson You are definitely on something, both with pushing documents/windows aside, but also they way you want to attach work items.
Your work items sidebar is like folders for humans, and it seems we developers have been blind about it. We have similar concepts in our IDEs already with open documents docs, with project explorers attached to our code. We just didn't see and transform it.
@scottjenson Great talk, thank you. Your concept of a filesystem with working memory would be a game changer for messed-up "I may need this later for documentation"-folders.