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As a counterpoint (and not necessarily a counterargument), this sort of paradigm would be orthogonal to and perhaps incompatible with the merits of "personal" c
by turboponyy 4y ago
As a counterpoint (and not necessarily a counterargument), this sort of paradigm would be orthogonal to and perhaps incompatible with the merits of "personal" computing. Collaborating in this kind of multiuser workspace requires common knowledge of a shared interface that does not necessarily provide efficient workflow for all. If a person were to use my customized setup, they wouldn't know how to close a window, let alone how to open one - everything is optimized solely for my personal ease of use, almost always at the cost of familiarity.
One of the few reasons why I have Windows installed on my machine was so that my ex-girlfriend could use my computer when she needed to. Somewhat amusingly, I had to teach her how to access the arrow keys under a function layer of my 60% keyboard to select the correct bootloader entry in order to do that. That's two new concepts foreign to most average users just to do what they might consider "turn on the computer".
- mwcampbell 4y agoYour concern about tailored user interfaces also applies to disabled people who physically can't do things the same way as the rest of the group, e.g. blind people who need to use a screen reader and keyboard commands rather than look at the screen and use a pointing device. Having said that, some implementations of collaboration don't have this problem. In most modern networked applications that are designed to be multi-user, each client runs its own instance of the UI, and the clients synchronize the underlying data. This scheme can accommodate different user needs much better than, say, using something like VNC to have a bunch of people watch a shared frame buffer and take turns sending input to a shared UI.