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I think that MS here is being used as a convenient scapegoat. This worry was never expressed at the time in significant terms. The FAT and SMB patents were much

by toyg 4y ago

I think that MS here is being used as a convenient scapegoat. This worry was never expressed at the time in significant terms. The FAT and SMB patents were much more of a worry than anything related to the desktop interface - only outright clones were being pursued. At the time, KDE, GNOME and Ubuntu developers alike, were simply drunk on popularity. Linux usage was in ascendancy, money was being thrown around, and the FOSS world was starting to attract young designers who saw it as a cheap way to build professional credibility. And then the iPhone happened and the whole UX world just went apeshit. The core teams really thought they had a shot at redesigning how people interact with computers, "like Apple did with phones". Interaction targets moved from keyboard+mouse to touch screens, because "convergence" and the fact that the mobile sector was suddenly awash with cash. It's sad that people try to justify their missteps in this way. Microsoft was (and is) a terrible company and a constant threat to the FOSS ecosystem, but defining some of the biggest design choices of the Linux desktop only in antagonistic or reflective terms does a real disservice to those projects and the people who worked in them. If experience is the name we give our errors, refusing to accept errors were made means stating you've learnt nothing.

RicoElectrico 4y ago
> And then the iPhone happened and the whole UX world just went apeshit. Oh, I remember when I could go to Medium every week or so, and there were numerous useful (or somewhat useful) articles tagged with UX - and then it slowly died out.
- alfalfasprout 4y ago
  And it's quite sad. Over the years it feels like UX has become stagnant and rather sterile.
  - epolanski 4y ago
    UX? I would be even happy with more UI variety. I remember jobs and gates being asked at a d8 conference in 2008 how they imagined desktops in 10/15 years. Gates spoke about voice and motion as controls, while jobs argued that on desktop there wasn't much to change because customers were probably already used to things in certain way and any disruption without a net advantage was just not gonna happen. He also said that the only chance for a ux change were mobile devices as they were a fresh start for everyone.
  - worthless-trash 4y ago
    I write that off as the "magnetic aura" affect. When so many apps/pages are written the ones that have the closest UX to the UX the user already has are the ones that are going to be successful. You can deviate only slightly from the existing 'critical mass' or risk not getting adpoted.
  - derefr 4y ago
    UX for VR/AR must be a developing subfield right now, no?
    - solardev 4y ago
      Is anyone still seriously pursuing that? I thought it was a burst bubble by now.
      - selfhoster11 4y ago
        VR hardware is barely entering the stage where it's affordable, yet becoming more useful for mainstream tasks. It's far from being a bubble, let alone from bursting.
        hulitu 4y ago
        I can't wait for MS Word VR/AR plugin.
        solardev 4y ago
        I feel like I've been hearing this since the Nintendo VirtualBoy, and then again with the failed VRML craze, and then again with Oculus, and then again with that leaping whale thing, and then again with the Microsoft and Google versions... yet fundamentally nothing has changed. It's glasses that project 3D images. So what? Who actually wants this stuff? The novelty wears off after a game or two, and aside from super niche industries (remote surgeries?) there's never been a convincing use case...
        selfhoster11 4y ago
        One hypothetical killer app for me is the ability to have unlimited displays arranged spatially (the last part is important - virtual desktops on normal displays just don’t work for me), as well as visualisation of complex system states in a way that can make use of our built-in spatial reasoning abilities. You need pretty dang dense VR displays for this, and the old stuff was nowhere close to being usable.
  - solardev 4y ago
    In contrast, I'm so so happy that UX has largely settled on "this works and people know it" researched best practices. We don't need to be reinventing the steering wheel or AC controls for no reason (looking at you, Tesla). The 90s and early 2000s were a hellscape of design nightmares between geocities, MySpace, iframes, and everyone and their grandma trying out new designs. 99% of it was trash. The bog standard website doesn't have to be someone's art project anymore, and that's a great thing for usability. UX isn't stagnant, it's just matured since its infancy. (edit: for example, consider Google's material vs Apple's design systems, where they agree or disagree, even though they are both pretty mature by now. What should a primary call to action look like so it's obvious? How should you navigate a multi layered app? How should notifications work? Etc. Still a lot of interesting problems, they're just more nuanced now. Or look at some of the best selling design apps with complex features and UIs, they are innovating plenty. Or dashboards. Or DevEx stuff. Lots of fun new developments out there, even though some of the older problems have been satisfactorily solved!)
    - hulitu 4y ago
      > UX isn't stagnant, it's just matured since its infancy. I'm sorry to tell you but the kid got polio and, as an adult, is quiet disabled.
    - selfhoster11 4y ago
      Material is mature in the same way that a corpse or old cheese turns "mature". Mature, sure it is, but is it acceptable? I would say it's not. Sometime after skeumorphic design started dying off, UX has gone in an extremely bad direction. UIs have dropped key affordances and visual cues in favour of oversimplified design elements. UI/UX designers started to optimise for juicing the maximum amount of money and attention out of users too - the focus on "calls to action" and notifications is one example. Features that are 10x force multipliers for users when used sparingly in designs, have been overused to the extent that they become cognitive burdens. Apps are getting redesigned on a whim, confusing users who cannot adjust. UX designers are having fun with the new landscape, but users are not. It's time this is recognised, and designers start to pull more pages from Apple's design handbook, and not Google's.
  - hulitu 4y ago
    Stagnant ? No. The favourite sport of UX people is moving elements around, autohiding things and moving things to titlebar.
  - selfhoster11 4y ago
    FWIW I agree. Old UI/UX wasn't perfect but it beats deserts of blank space and hamburger menu hellscapes.
gjsman-1000 4y ago
Does anybody remember Ubuntu from the early 2010s era, when I downloaded my first copy? Ubuntu was talking about scopes and lenses in your Dashboard (basically, internet content in your start menu, which they thought was revolutionary), Ubuntu TV (nobody adopted that), and later, Ubuntu on Phones and Tablets with a (to put it mildly) bastardized Ubuntu 16.04 install that some phones are still stuck on to this day in UBports, in part because they were actually a Ubuntu/Android hybrid system with some Android driver compatibility blended in for good measure because they couldn't get all the drivers running in GNU Linux, so you had a mess of Android and GNU Linux drivers simultaneously? And after all that, the headline feature, scopes again! Not better privacy, not features any user otherwise really cared about, just scopes and lenses again and "it's Linux, on phones, with a Qt interface!" Oh, and it will have convergence in the future. Convergence, convergence, that was a buzzword for a while. A neat idea... but Microsoft had the same idea, tried it on Windows Phone, and then completely abandoned the idea, years after Ubuntu had the idea and years before Ubuntu cut their losses. That was a completely unnecessary disaster. I love Ubuntu as much as anybody, but looking back, it 100% deserved to fail as much as I would have wanted it to succeed. It's just an example of how, sometimes, it doesn't take a evil competitor megacorporation trying to undermine us - sometimes we've got plenty of blame ourselves for not succeeding.
- sylens 4y ago
  Yes, it was a crazy time for Ubuntu, especially for someone who first got introduced to it in 2007 and really enjoyed using an eeePC with it
  - protonbob 4y ago
    That is crazy. I had the same experience but in 2009 and Ubuntu Netbook Remix. Now that was incredible. Perfect for small screens.
    - nibbleshifter 4y ago
      I was gutted when they stopped supporting the netbook remix, that was bloody peak UI/UX for smaller screens.
ARandomerDude 4y ago
> If experience is the name we give our errors, refusing to accept errors were made means stating you've learnt nothing. That's a line worth memorizing. Well done.
- toyg 4y ago
  I have to admit I had great help: the first half of the sentence is by Oscar Wilde.
emilsedgh 4y ago
> money was being thrown around Im not really educated about the GNOME world, but I was involved on KDE side of things (very minor contributor). Money was _never_ thrown around. At best, a handful of engineers from a few different companies (TrollTech/Nokia, Novell/SUSE, Red Hat, Canonical) were hired to work full time and that was pretty much it. I don't think more than 10-15 engineers have done paid worked on KDE at any given time. Most of the contributions were volunteers. There was a few attempts on KDE side to get paid by Intel to develop an office suite for mobile but it was also pretty small. And to this date that is still the case with KDE. Very few engineers paid to work on it hired by entirely different set of companies like Blue Systems or Krita trying to make a living with very modest donations and contributions. KDE is one of the biggest softwares out there. It was the first SVN repository to reach 1 million commits, etc etc and most of it has been volunteer work. Any claim that money was thrown at KDE really upsets me because it would be a complete mischaracterization of the nature of the project and motivations of people behind it. Your main point is valid though. FAT and SMB patents were more serious threats.
- gjsman-1000 4y ago
  Even after FAT was cleared up, exFAT was under patents until, like, 2019 before Microsoft declared they wouldn't enforce them on Linux. That was kind of an issue for a while as exFAT is the mandatory file format of SDXC cards. If you had a SD card >=64GB before then, Linux wasn't mainlining support because the situation was too risky.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    Is it? I'm pretty sure I've formatted them to ext2/4 before and had no issues. Seems more like SD cards are used in devices, and devices stuck to exFAT. I had to format to ext to make my 256M SD card work in my N900.
    - NavinF 4y ago
      IMO that's nitpicking. Of course filesystems like ext4 work with pretty much any block device. If the standard requires only exFAT support, devices like cameras aren't gonna support anything else.
pessimizer 4y ago
And MS Windows 8 was horrific in the same vein as GNOME 3 and Unity. It looked at the time more like follow-the-leader from the most ambitious Linux vendors (Red Shat and Ubuntu.)
- galangalalgol 4y ago
  I've never had any issue with gnome 3 or unity or gnomeshell or whatever its called. I started out on linux with Slackware and windowmaker. It was beautiful! And fast! And copy and paste didn't work between applications. I grudgingly used kde for a while and GTK. I then went osx for a while, and when gnome 3 and unity came out it had all my favorite bits about osx without the clutter. I went online to find oodles of hate. I never have understood it.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    I've met people who loved Windows 8. Different strokes.
    - hermitdev 4y ago
      There were things I loved about Windows 8 over 7. The UI, however, was not one of them. For me, the killer feature for 8 over 7 or earlier was HyperV. Having local easily usable VMs was awesome. Now, with WSL 2, my need for HyperV has diminished, but it's still useful at times. HyperV was far more usable to me than VirtualBox. I'll admit I never tried VMware workstation, but I also wasn't going to pay what they were asking (at the time).
      - pjmlp 4y ago
        WSL 2 runs on top of Hyper-V.
  - Nursie 4y ago
    > I went online to find oodles of hate. I never have understood it. You update your workstation one day to find the distro put a new UI on it. OK, this is interesting but you need to get on with some work, so you just switch back to the old one. That option's gone. Hmm, OK well let's have a quick play with this new thing... Wait, you can't move anything around to where you're used to? WTF. And there are whole different window-interaction paradigms, odd choices about workspaces over window manipulation. Huh... well at least you can still run the programs you need to. Wait, why isn't the messenger app you need for work appearing in the notification area? What is that in the notification area? A different app that you can't remove, don't need and with no way to replace it? WTF. OK you really do need to go back to the old version. But the distro repos don't even have it, so you can't even install it. WTF? Is it just gone? You were just using that yesterday! You go online to investigate and find out there's been this major update, some distros have switched to it already, and it seems like it was a deliberate choice to make it impossible to run the old thing alongside. The old thing is now abandonware, instantly, and if you want to work the way you have been for the last ten years, you're wrong, old fashioned, out of date, stifling open source and generally a problem. Wow OK. Does that explain it OK? I'm not saying the vitriol online is all justified, but this is how a lot of us first encountered Gnome 3/Shell. Personally at that point I'd already been using Xfce on a low-powered machine, so I just switched over, and within a couple of minutes I had my desktop back how I like it, and got on with my life. But I'll always remember that at some point the Gnome folks (and the distros share some blame) actively ripped away my way of working, and told me I was a dick for not thanking them for it.
29athrowaway 4y ago
Microsoft is the reason the Linux desktop is still not a thing in 2022. At every step of the way for many years Microsoft has always done some psychotic ill-intentioned thing to monopolize the PC. Even in 2022. - OpenGL is crossplatform, we could have crossplatform games... but no. Microsoft didn't like that. So they made sure nobody used OpenGL so that Windows became the de-facto platform for PC games: http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/01/Why-you-should-use-OpenGL-and-not-DirectX http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/01/Why-you-should-use-OpenGL-an... - Regulators demanded Microsoft to define an open format for Office documents. They did, by creating the most complicated standard they could in a 6000 page document, and then decided to not use it by default in MS Office so that they could keep an advantage over competitors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open_XML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open... - Internet Explorer for many years was the standard browser and internet browsing experience on non-Windows platforms had compatibility problems. They didn't pass Web Standards Compliance Acid Tests, so that a website that respected standards didn't render properly on Internet Explorer. Sometimes Microsoft websites would deliberately send broken CSS stylesheets to non-IE browsers. - They tried to lock down the PC with Palladium, they failed. They now did it with Pluto and succeeded. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you-trust.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you-trust.en.html - They tried to compete with google by stealing their top results. https://www.wired.com/2011/02/bing-copies-google/ https://www.wired.com/2011/02/bing-copies-google/ - They have bought every major PC game publisher: Bethesda, Activision/Blizzard, Mojang, and countless others. But there's hope... - Vulkan is the successor to OpenGL, and there is an open source Direct3D implementation on top of Vulkan. Wine/Proton uses this to run Windows games with a very low performance overhead. - There are Open source office suites other than OpenOffice/LibreOffice with a proper UI that do not look like developer art. There are also cloud office suites like Google docs you can use for free. - Internet Explorer is dead and their successors are dead. - Nobody uses Bing and it will likely never be the top search engine.
- twblalock 4y ago
  The Linux desktop is its own worst enemy. The fragmentation, the inconsistency, the need to drop into a terminal to debug certain things, and the difficulty of dealing with driver problems for inexperienced users all do more damage than anything Microsoft attempted to do.
cuddlybacon 4y ago
I agree MS is probably being scapegoated here. I was using Linux around this time and I don't remember hearing about this threat either. > At the time, KDE, GNOME and Ubuntu developers alike, were simply drunk on popularity. But I don't agree with this. I think a more charitable explanation is they listened to a loud minority, one I would have been part of. I used Gnome 2 at the time, but I also changed a lot. It's been a decade, so forgive me for forgetting most of the specific app names but: I used compiz then later beryl. I replaced the bottom bar with a dock. I removed the application launcher and instead used the dock plus a Spotlight clone. I switched apps with the Expose plugin provided by compiz/beryl. My top panel had a clock, system tray, and I don't think anything else. We were definitely loud, but maybe also a minority. Threads, blogs, newsites, etc constantly had discussion on new apps you could use to mod your Linux (mostly Gnome) desktop experience. I remember cycling thru several docks and several spotlight clones within a couple years. The people behind Gnome 3 and Unity very well could have seen all that buzz as an indicator that this is what people really wanted. So that's what they built. But in retrospect saying that you find the defaults fine and there isn't a real need to change them doesn't make for a very interesting blog post. So the people who were just fine with Gnome 2 didn't get heard until Gnome 2 was gone.
- sparkie 4y ago
  I've also little doubt that Compiz/Beryl/Fusion envy was a major motivating factor for starting GNOME3 etc. Compiz gave desktop Linux a massive boost in popularity. Prior to this desktop rendering was primarily CPU bound and did not use compositing. If these projects were born from compiz-envy, then it was for the right reasons, and maybe they could've done a good job. But then shortly after came the iPhone, and the developers felt like they had to copy design cues from Apple. It was no longer just about improving desktop rendering and enabling new kinds of visuals. They wanted a combined workspace for the desktop and phone, and they wanted a "pattern language" like Apple, so they limited the ways in which users could tinker with their tools, aiming towards uniformity. The GNOME3 designers/developers in particular had a very pretentious attitude and ignored complaints. It might not have been so bad if they had succeeded right away, but the earliest releases of GNOME3 and KDE4 were heavily bug-ridden. The whole desktop would crash, or come out with strange glitches. Sometimes you would lose your desktop configuration and had to start from scratch. People who were using Linux for real work would have to revert back to something more stable, and the newer desktops had already left a sour taste. None of this had anything to do with Microsoft.
jeremyjh 4y ago
Yeah I don’t buy it either. If there were Windows 95 design patents they were more than 11 years old by 2006 and had only a couple more years of life left.
- tinus_hn 4y ago
  A key difference between a utility patent and a design patent is that the design patent, like a trademark, does not expire.
  - jeremyjh 4y ago
    That is not true; a design patent from 1995 would have had a fourteen year life. https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s1505.html https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s1505.html
    - tinus_hn 4y ago
      I see, I don’t know why but I was under the impression they were infinite but they apparently are not.
- lproven 4y ago
  [Article author here] Follow the links I put in the piece. No legal action was taken in the end, partly because they couldn't work out who to sue, and partly because of the legal principle of laches. I cover this in the last article I linked to, which I wrote, a decade ago.
  - jeremyjh 4y ago
    Why does Miguel call it nonsense?
- POPOSYS 4y ago
  It is generally not of interest if you buy something or not. For other readers it would be interesting to read evidence about the original article being wrong / right or more details that helps to better understand the situation.
nl 4y ago
Yeah the linked post is nonsense. Apple's "Look and Feel" lawsuits had failed by then, and it was clear there was no way Microsoft would succeed. As you say, they were only pursuing exact copies. The real problem was the KDE/Gnome split. KDE came first (1996), but used the non-free Qt. Gnome was started (1997) to be entirely free, and so developers split like that. Subsequent splits were for a bunch of reasons, but none were really related to MS threats.
- lproven 4y ago
  It's not nonsense; I wrote it, and I provided citations, and I've posted more upthread here. I wrote it because it was 15 years ago now and everyone is forgetting about it now.
  - nl 4y ago
    I was there too - hell I was using newsgroups when Miguel posted his Gnome post. And I'd note Miguel says the same thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32258035 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32258035 Just because The Register was posting something it didn't make it true then, and still isn't. The Register always posted random anti-MS scapegoating articles, and it was nonsense then and remains nonsense now. The article you post at the end of the linked article is typical ignorant nonsense. Patents don't cover visual appearance - Design Patents can, but they are very specific and MS didn't have them. So it's both ignorant of IP law, and of the history of the projects.
rst 4y ago
This omits another IP-related issue of at least equal significance. KDE is based on the Qt UI toolkit library, which had an encumbered license at the time the GNOME project got started (1997) -- and the first free software license it was released under, the QPL, was not GPL-compatible. This was resolved in 2000 (with a GPLed release of Qt), but by then, GNOME had its own momentum.
- toyg 4y ago
  We are talking about the era when GNOME 3 / KDE 4 / Unity were born, which was around 2007. By then, the QPL issue had long been resolved and nobody cared anymore.
  - rst 4y ago
    Title on the piece is "Why GNOME happened". The reason why GNOME happened is QPL, not legal threats from elsewhere years later.
    - toyg 4y ago
      Yeah but the piece actually moves on from GNOME 2. The title is as confused as the author, or maybe intentionally deceiving. I agree that QPL was why the original GNOME started.
antod 4y ago
> I think that MS here is being used as a convenient scapegoat. Yup, the fact that many prominent desktop people from that era refute that here, that all the links in the article point to TheRegister, and that nobody else seems to remember it happening that way - it is probably safe to disregard it.
- lproven 4y ago
  Hi. I wrote the article. You're wrong. I work for the Register now. That's why I pick links to them: I have saved searches that make it quick and easy. I wasn't working for them then. In fact I only started freelancing for them in 2009 and went full-time late last year. Secondly, many other now-popular tech news sites weren't around 15 years ago, or the links have gone. The Reg is stable and doesn't delete or move old stories. This was entirely factual, and if you go Googling you can find plenty of supporting evidence from other sites. CNN: https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/05/28/100033867/ https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007... ComputerWorld: https://www.computerworld.com/article/2566211/study--linux-may-infringe-on-283-patents.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/2566211/study--linux-m... And so on. https://www.mercurynews.com/2007/05/15/microsoft-says-linux-open-office-free-e-mail-step-on-patents/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2007/05/15/microsoft-says-linux-... The fact that some people weren't paying attention and forgot this does not mean it isn't true.
  - jsnell 4y ago
    The claim you made originally was not just that there were patent threats: it's that those patent threats were taken seriously by the people building the desktop environments and that the major redesigns were motivated by the threats. You keep posting links to the first, none to the latter. And it's specifically the latter part that people doubt. If this had actually happened like you claim, there would surely be some kind of actual evidence of the redesigns being motivated by patents. Links to email discussions, design documents, recordings of presentations, something. But you seem to have nothing, and are instead trying to boost the credibility of the stuff you invented by providing links to the part of the story that wasn't actually under doubt. Even if there had been some kind of a secret motivation behind the designs, and the publicly claimed justifications were really just a parallell construction, it's completely implausible that this shadowy cabal could have mainted opsec for this long without something leaking to the public.
dotancohen 4y ago
> If experience is the name we give our errors, refusing to accept > errors were made means stating you've learnt nothing. Right into the quotes.org file. To whom shall I attribute it? Seriously, you've just summed up a significant fraction of both my parenting and my professional life.
- toyg 4y ago
  The first half is by Oscar Wilde, the second half from my brain - although I cannot state beyond doubt that I didn't pick it up somewhere else in my 40+ years of life.
giancarlostoro 4y ago
There was a time when Ubuntu or Fedora, I don't remember which, but it had Gnome 3 from its earlier days, had a fancier concept of multiple desktops to where I could be on any desktop and if I had Pidgin (or some similar IM application... idr which) open and got a message, it would "zoom out" on my desktop view just slightly enough and on the border show an overlay of my chat convos, so I could be on any desktop and talk to anyone, kind of like how you can answer a text on iOS from a notification if you hold tap on it or whatever. I thought that was next level, then I never saw it again, nor could I figure out how to make it happen again. I think they really were close to making some amazing UIs but due to the nature of Linux neck-beards being slow and repugnant to change (looking at Devuan, Trinity Desktop Environment, MATE, and so on...) I'm sure they opted to remove it. I really would love to see someone just take Ubuntu kind of like how Budgie was inspired by Material Design from Android, and just work on something new that really makes your software a little nicer in terms of being integrated with the Desktop Environment, something I would argue Mobile gets well, and would be a boost for multi-tasking. I really do like Ubuntu Budgie, but it feels kind of incomplete. The most decently integrated DE I can think of is probably KDE since a lot of the apps are made with KDE libraries, and they integrate nicely, you can expect the same behavior out of all of them. I know I kind of went all over the place, I guess my pipedream is to see some companies invest into R&D on Desktop Environments to see what we can do better. I'm really getting sick of Windows again, with all its telemetry but it is a nightmare to get Linux going due to the GPU driver situation, plus I don't want to spend a fortune on a GPU.
parasense 4y ago
I remember at the time the FOSS community found a bunch of prior art that would have most likely invalidate the Microsoft claims. There were plenty of graphical UI in existence that Microsoft probably copied. I do not have links to the epic /. flame-fests on the topic, but perhaps somebody else can find them. Lots of people were sharing links on slashdot with evidence showing how Microsoft would lose.

by toyg 4y ago

RicoElectrico 4y ago

> And then the iPhone happened and the whole UX world just went apeshit. Oh, I remember when I could go to Medium every week or so, and there were numerous useful (or somewhat useful) articles tagged with UX - and then it slowly died out.

alfalfasprout 4y ago
And it's quite sad. Over the years it feels like UX has become stagnant and rather sterile.
- epolanski 4y ago
  UX? I would be even happy with more UI variety. I remember jobs and gates being asked at a d8 conference in 2008 how they imagined desktops in 10/15 years. Gates spoke about voice and motion as controls, while jobs argued that on desktop there wasn't much to change because customers were probably already used to things in certain way and any disruption without a net advantage was just not gonna happen. He also said that the only chance for a ux change were mobile devices as they were a fresh start for everyone.
- worthless-trash 4y ago
  I write that off as the "magnetic aura" affect. When so many apps/pages are written the ones that have the closest UX to the UX the user already has are the ones that are going to be successful. You can deviate only slightly from the existing 'critical mass' or risk not getting adpoted.
- derefr 4y ago
  UX for VR/AR must be a developing subfield right now, no?
  - solardev 4y ago
    Is anyone still seriously pursuing that? I thought it was a burst bubble by now.
    - selfhoster11 4y ago
      VR hardware is barely entering the stage where it's affordable, yet becoming more useful for mainstream tasks. It's far from being a bubble, let alone from bursting.
      - hulitu 4y ago
        I can't wait for MS Word VR/AR plugin.
      - solardev 4y ago
        I feel like I've been hearing this since the Nintendo VirtualBoy, and then again with the failed VRML craze, and then again with Oculus, and then again with that leaping whale thing, and then again with the Microsoft and Google versions... yet fundamentally nothing has changed. It's glasses that project 3D images. So what? Who actually wants this stuff? The novelty wears off after a game or two, and aside from super niche industries (remote surgeries?) there's never been a convincing use case...
        selfhoster11 4y ago
        One hypothetical killer app for me is the ability to have unlimited displays arranged spatially (the last part is important - virtual desktops on normal displays just don’t work for me), as well as visualisation of complex system states in a way that can make use of our built-in spatial reasoning abilities. You need pretty dang dense VR displays for this, and the old stuff was nowhere close to being usable.
- solardev 4y ago
  In contrast, I'm so so happy that UX has largely settled on "this works and people know it" researched best practices. We don't need to be reinventing the steering wheel or AC controls for no reason (looking at you, Tesla). The 90s and early 2000s were a hellscape of design nightmares between geocities, MySpace, iframes, and everyone and their grandma trying out new designs. 99% of it was trash. The bog standard website doesn't have to be someone's art project anymore, and that's a great thing for usability. UX isn't stagnant, it's just matured since its infancy. (edit: for example, consider Google's material vs Apple's design systems, where they agree or disagree, even though they are both pretty mature by now. What should a primary call to action look like so it's obvious? How should you navigate a multi layered app? How should notifications work? Etc. Still a lot of interesting problems, they're just more nuanced now. Or look at some of the best selling design apps with complex features and UIs, they are innovating plenty. Or dashboards. Or DevEx stuff. Lots of fun new developments out there, even though some of the older problems have been satisfactorily solved!)
  - hulitu 4y ago
    > UX isn't stagnant, it's just matured since its infancy. I'm sorry to tell you but the kid got polio and, as an adult, is quiet disabled.
  - selfhoster11 4y ago
    Material is mature in the same way that a corpse or old cheese turns "mature". Mature, sure it is, but is it acceptable? I would say it's not. Sometime after skeumorphic design started dying off, UX has gone in an extremely bad direction. UIs have dropped key affordances and visual cues in favour of oversimplified design elements. UI/UX designers started to optimise for juicing the maximum amount of money and attention out of users too - the focus on "calls to action" and notifications is one example. Features that are 10x force multipliers for users when used sparingly in designs, have been overused to the extent that they become cognitive burdens. Apps are getting redesigned on a whim, confusing users who cannot adjust. UX designers are having fun with the new landscape, but users are not. It's time this is recognised, and designers start to pull more pages from Apple's design handbook, and not Google's.
- hulitu 4y ago
  Stagnant ? No. The favourite sport of UX people is moving elements around, autohiding things and moving things to titlebar.
- selfhoster11 4y ago
  FWIW I agree. Old UI/UX wasn't perfect but it beats deserts of blank space and hamburger menu hellscapes.

gjsman-1000 4y ago

Does anybody remember Ubuntu from the early 2010s era, when I downloaded my first copy? Ubuntu was talking about scopes and lenses in your Dashboard (basically, internet content in your start menu, which they thought was revolutionary), Ubuntu TV (nobody adopted that), and later, Ubuntu on Phones and Tablets with a (to put it mildly) bastardized Ubuntu 16.04 install that some phones are still stuck on to this day in UBports, in part because they were actually a Ubuntu/Android hybrid system with some Android driver compatibility blended in for good measure because they couldn't get all the drivers running in GNU Linux, so you had a mess of Android and GNU Linux drivers simultaneously? And after all that, the headline feature, scopes again! Not better privacy, not features any user otherwise really cared about, just scopes and lenses again and "it's Linux, on phones, with a Qt interface!" Oh, and it will have convergence in the future. Convergence, convergence, that was a buzzword for a while. A neat idea... but Microsoft had the same idea, tried it on Windows Phone, and then completely abandoned the idea, years after Ubuntu had the idea and years before Ubuntu cut their losses. That was a completely unnecessary disaster. I love Ubuntu as much as anybody, but looking back, it 100% deserved to fail as much as I would have wanted it to succeed. It's just an example of how, sometimes, it doesn't take a evil competitor megacorporation trying to undermine us - sometimes we've got plenty of blame ourselves for not succeeding.

sylens 4y ago
Yes, it was a crazy time for Ubuntu, especially for someone who first got introduced to it in 2007 and really enjoyed using an eeePC with it
- protonbob 4y ago
  That is crazy. I had the same experience but in 2009 and Ubuntu Netbook Remix. Now that was incredible. Perfect for small screens.
  - nibbleshifter 4y ago
    I was gutted when they stopped supporting the netbook remix, that was bloody peak UI/UX for smaller screens.

ARandomerDude 4y ago

> If experience is the name we give our errors, refusing to accept errors were made means stating you've learnt nothing. That's a line worth memorizing. Well done.

toyg 4y ago
I have to admit I had great help: the first half of the sentence is by Oscar Wilde.

emilsedgh 4y ago

> money was being thrown around Im not really educated about the GNOME world, but I was involved on KDE side of things (very minor contributor). Money was _never_ thrown around. At best, a handful of engineers from a few different companies (TrollTech/Nokia, Novell/SUSE, Red Hat, Canonical) were hired to work full time and that was pretty much it. I don't think more than 10-15 engineers have done paid worked on KDE at any given time. Most of the contributions were volunteers. There was a few attempts on KDE side to get paid by Intel to develop an office suite for mobile but it was also pretty small. And to this date that is still the case with KDE. Very few engineers paid to work on it hired by entirely different set of companies like Blue Systems or Krita trying to make a living with very modest donations and contributions. KDE is one of the biggest softwares out there. It was the first SVN repository to reach 1 million commits, etc etc and most of it has been volunteer work. Any claim that money was thrown at KDE really upsets me because it would be a complete mischaracterization of the nature of the project and motivations of people behind it. Your main point is valid though. FAT and SMB patents were more serious threats.

gjsman-1000 4y ago
Even after FAT was cleared up, exFAT was under patents until, like, 2019 before Microsoft declared they wouldn't enforce them on Linux. That was kind of an issue for a while as exFAT is the mandatory file format of SDXC cards. If you had a SD card >=64GB before then, Linux wasn't mainlining support because the situation was too risky.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  Is it? I'm pretty sure I've formatted them to ext2/4 before and had no issues. Seems more like SD cards are used in devices, and devices stuck to exFAT. I had to format to ext to make my 256M SD card work in my N900.
  - NavinF 4y ago
    IMO that's nitpicking. Of course filesystems like ext4 work with pretty much any block device. If the standard requires only exFAT support, devices like cameras aren't gonna support anything else.

pessimizer 4y ago

And MS Windows 8 was horrific in the same vein as GNOME 3 and Unity. It looked at the time more like follow-the-leader from the most ambitious Linux vendors (Red Shat and Ubuntu.)

galangalalgol 4y ago
I've never had any issue with gnome 3 or unity or gnomeshell or whatever its called. I started out on linux with Slackware and windowmaker. It was beautiful! And fast! And copy and paste didn't work between applications. I grudgingly used kde for a while and GTK. I then went osx for a while, and when gnome 3 and unity came out it had all my favorite bits about osx without the clutter. I went online to find oodles of hate. I never have understood it.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  I've met people who loved Windows 8. Different strokes.
  - hermitdev 4y ago
    There were things I loved about Windows 8 over 7. The UI, however, was not one of them. For me, the killer feature for 8 over 7 or earlier was HyperV. Having local easily usable VMs was awesome. Now, with WSL 2, my need for HyperV has diminished, but it's still useful at times. HyperV was far more usable to me than VirtualBox. I'll admit I never tried VMware workstation, but I also wasn't going to pay what they were asking (at the time).
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      WSL 2 runs on top of Hyper-V.
- Nursie 4y ago
  > I went online to find oodles of hate. I never have understood it. You update your workstation one day to find the distro put a new UI on it. OK, this is interesting but you need to get on with some work, so you just switch back to the old one. That option's gone. Hmm, OK well let's have a quick play with this new thing... Wait, you can't move anything around to where you're used to? WTF. And there are whole different window-interaction paradigms, odd choices about workspaces over window manipulation. Huh... well at least you can still run the programs you need to. Wait, why isn't the messenger app you need for work appearing in the notification area? What is that in the notification area? A different app that you can't remove, don't need and with no way to replace it? WTF. OK you really do need to go back to the old version. But the distro repos don't even have it, so you can't even install it. WTF? Is it just gone? You were just using that yesterday! You go online to investigate and find out there's been this major update, some distros have switched to it already, and it seems like it was a deliberate choice to make it impossible to run the old thing alongside. The old thing is now abandonware, instantly, and if you want to work the way you have been for the last ten years, you're wrong, old fashioned, out of date, stifling open source and generally a problem. Wow OK. Does that explain it OK? I'm not saying the vitriol online is all justified, but this is how a lot of us first encountered Gnome 3/Shell. Personally at that point I'd already been using Xfce on a low-powered machine, so I just switched over, and within a couple of minutes I had my desktop back how I like it, and got on with my life. But I'll always remember that at some point the Gnome folks (and the distros share some blame) actively ripped away my way of working, and told me I was a dick for not thanking them for it.

29athrowaway 4y ago

Microsoft is the reason the Linux desktop is still not a thing in 2022. At every step of the way for many years Microsoft has always done some psychotic ill-intentioned thing to monopolize the PC. Even in 2022. - OpenGL is crossplatform, we could have crossplatform games... but no. Microsoft didn't like that. So they made sure nobody used OpenGL so that Windows became the de-facto platform for PC games: http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/01/Why-you-should-use-OpenGL-and-not-DirectX http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/01/Why-you-should-use-OpenGL-an... - Regulators demanded Microsoft to define an open format for Office documents. They did, by creating the most complicated standard they could in a 6000 page document, and then decided to not use it by default in MS Office so that they could keep an advantage over competitors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open_XML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open... - Internet Explorer for many years was the standard browser and internet browsing experience on non-Windows platforms had compatibility problems. They didn't pass Web Standards Compliance Acid Tests, so that a website that respected standards didn't render properly on Internet Explorer. Sometimes Microsoft websites would deliberately send broken CSS stylesheets to non-IE browsers. - They tried to lock down the PC with Palladium, they failed. They now did it with Pluto and succeeded. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you-trust.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you-trust.en.html - They tried to compete with google by stealing their top results. https://www.wired.com/2011/02/bing-copies-google/ https://www.wired.com/2011/02/bing-copies-google/ - They have bought every major PC game publisher: Bethesda, Activision/Blizzard, Mojang, and countless others. But there's hope... - Vulkan is the successor to OpenGL, and there is an open source Direct3D implementation on top of Vulkan. Wine/Proton uses this to run Windows games with a very low performance overhead. - There are Open source office suites other than OpenOffice/LibreOffice with a proper UI that do not look like developer art. There are also cloud office suites like Google docs you can use for free. - Internet Explorer is dead and their successors are dead. - Nobody uses Bing and it will likely never be the top search engine.

twblalock 4y ago
The Linux desktop is its own worst enemy. The fragmentation, the inconsistency, the need to drop into a terminal to debug certain things, and the difficulty of dealing with driver problems for inexperienced users all do more damage than anything Microsoft attempted to do.

cuddlybacon 4y ago

I agree MS is probably being scapegoated here. I was using Linux around this time and I don't remember hearing about this threat either. > At the time, KDE, GNOME and Ubuntu developers alike, were simply drunk on popularity. But I don't agree with this. I think a more charitable explanation is they listened to a loud minority, one I would have been part of. I used Gnome 2 at the time, but I also changed a lot. It's been a decade, so forgive me for forgetting most of the specific app names but: I used compiz then later beryl. I replaced the bottom bar with a dock. I removed the application launcher and instead used the dock plus a Spotlight clone. I switched apps with the Expose plugin provided by compiz/beryl. My top panel had a clock, system tray, and I don't think anything else. We were definitely loud, but maybe also a minority. Threads, blogs, newsites, etc constantly had discussion on new apps you could use to mod your Linux (mostly Gnome) desktop experience. I remember cycling thru several docks and several spotlight clones within a couple years. The people behind Gnome 3 and Unity very well could have seen all that buzz as an indicator that this is what people really wanted. So that's what they built. But in retrospect saying that you find the defaults fine and there isn't a real need to change them doesn't make for a very interesting blog post. So the people who were just fine with Gnome 2 didn't get heard until Gnome 2 was gone.

sparkie 4y ago
I've also little doubt that Compiz/Beryl/Fusion envy was a major motivating factor for starting GNOME3 etc. Compiz gave desktop Linux a massive boost in popularity. Prior to this desktop rendering was primarily CPU bound and did not use compositing. If these projects were born from compiz-envy, then it was for the right reasons, and maybe they could've done a good job. But then shortly after came the iPhone, and the developers felt like they had to copy design cues from Apple. It was no longer just about improving desktop rendering and enabling new kinds of visuals. They wanted a combined workspace for the desktop and phone, and they wanted a "pattern language" like Apple, so they limited the ways in which users could tinker with their tools, aiming towards uniformity. The GNOME3 designers/developers in particular had a very pretentious attitude and ignored complaints. It might not have been so bad if they had succeeded right away, but the earliest releases of GNOME3 and KDE4 were heavily bug-ridden. The whole desktop would crash, or come out with strange glitches. Sometimes you would lose your desktop configuration and had to start from scratch. People who were using Linux for real work would have to revert back to something more stable, and the newer desktops had already left a sour taste. None of this had anything to do with Microsoft.

jeremyjh 4y ago

Yeah I don’t buy it either. If there were Windows 95 design patents they were more than 11 years old by 2006 and had only a couple more years of life left.

tinus_hn 4y ago
A key difference between a utility patent and a design patent is that the design patent, like a trademark, does not expire.
- jeremyjh 4y ago
  That is not true; a design patent from 1995 would have had a fourteen year life. https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s1505.html https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s1505.html
  - tinus_hn 4y ago
    I see, I don’t know why but I was under the impression they were infinite but they apparently are not.
lproven 4y ago
[Article author here] Follow the links I put in the piece. No legal action was taken in the end, partly because they couldn't work out who to sue, and partly because of the legal principle of laches. I cover this in the last article I linked to, which I wrote, a decade ago.
- jeremyjh 4y ago
  Why does Miguel call it nonsense?
POPOSYS 4y ago
It is generally not of interest if you buy something or not. For other readers it would be interesting to read evidence about the original article being wrong / right or more details that helps to better understand the situation.

nl 4y ago

Yeah the linked post is nonsense. Apple's "Look and Feel" lawsuits had failed by then, and it was clear there was no way Microsoft would succeed. As you say, they were only pursuing exact copies. The real problem was the KDE/Gnome split. KDE came first (1996), but used the non-free Qt. Gnome was started (1997) to be entirely free, and so developers split like that. Subsequent splits were for a bunch of reasons, but none were really related to MS threats.

lproven 4y ago
It's not nonsense; I wrote it, and I provided citations, and I've posted more upthread here. I wrote it because it was 15 years ago now and everyone is forgetting about it now.
- nl 4y ago
  I was there too - hell I was using newsgroups when Miguel posted his Gnome post. And I'd note Miguel says the same thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32258035 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32258035 Just because The Register was posting something it didn't make it true then, and still isn't. The Register always posted random anti-MS scapegoating articles, and it was nonsense then and remains nonsense now. The article you post at the end of the linked article is typical ignorant nonsense. Patents don't cover visual appearance - Design Patents can, but they are very specific and MS didn't have them. So it's both ignorant of IP law, and of the history of the projects.

rst 4y ago

This omits another IP-related issue of at least equal significance. KDE is based on the Qt UI toolkit library, which had an encumbered license at the time the GNOME project got started (1997) -- and the first free software license it was released under, the QPL, was not GPL-compatible. This was resolved in 2000 (with a GPLed release of Qt), but by then, GNOME had its own momentum.

toyg 4y ago
We are talking about the era when GNOME 3 / KDE 4 / Unity were born, which was around 2007. By then, the QPL issue had long been resolved and nobody cared anymore.
- rst 4y ago
  Title on the piece is "Why GNOME happened". The reason why GNOME happened is QPL, not legal threats from elsewhere years later.
  - toyg 4y ago
    Yeah but the piece actually moves on from GNOME 2. The title is as confused as the author, or maybe intentionally deceiving. I agree that QPL was why the original GNOME started.

antod 4y ago

> I think that MS here is being used as a convenient scapegoat. Yup, the fact that many prominent desktop people from that era refute that here, that all the links in the article point to TheRegister, and that nobody else seems to remember it happening that way - it is probably safe to disregard it.

lproven 4y ago
Hi. I wrote the article. You're wrong. I work for the Register now. That's why I pick links to them: I have saved searches that make it quick and easy. I wasn't working for them then. In fact I only started freelancing for them in 2009 and went full-time late last year. Secondly, many other now-popular tech news sites weren't around 15 years ago, or the links have gone. The Reg is stable and doesn't delete or move old stories. This was entirely factual, and if you go Googling you can find plenty of supporting evidence from other sites. CNN: https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/05/28/100033867/ https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007... ComputerWorld: https://www.computerworld.com/article/2566211/study--linux-may-infringe-on-283-patents.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/2566211/study--linux-m... And so on. https://www.mercurynews.com/2007/05/15/microsoft-says-linux-open-office-free-e-mail-step-on-patents/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2007/05/15/microsoft-says-linux-... The fact that some people weren't paying attention and forgot this does not mean it isn't true.
- jsnell 4y ago
  The claim you made originally was not just that there were patent threats: it's that those patent threats were taken seriously by the people building the desktop environments and that the major redesigns were motivated by the threats. You keep posting links to the first, none to the latter. And it's specifically the latter part that people doubt. If this had actually happened like you claim, there would surely be some kind of actual evidence of the redesigns being motivated by patents. Links to email discussions, design documents, recordings of presentations, something. But you seem to have nothing, and are instead trying to boost the credibility of the stuff you invented by providing links to the part of the story that wasn't actually under doubt. Even if there had been some kind of a secret motivation behind the designs, and the publicly claimed justifications were really just a parallell construction, it's completely implausible that this shadowy cabal could have mainted opsec for this long without something leaking to the public.

dotancohen 4y ago

> If experience is the name we give our errors, refusing to accept > errors were made means stating you've learnt nothing. Right into the quotes.org file. To whom shall I attribute it? Seriously, you've just summed up a significant fraction of both my parenting and my professional life.

toyg 4y ago
The first half is by Oscar Wilde, the second half from my brain - although I cannot state beyond doubt that I didn't pick it up somewhere else in my 40+ years of life.

giancarlostoro 4y ago

There was a time when Ubuntu or Fedora, I don't remember which, but it had Gnome 3 from its earlier days, had a fancier concept of multiple desktops to where I could be on any desktop and if I had Pidgin (or some similar IM application... idr which) open and got a message, it would "zoom out" on my desktop view just slightly enough and on the border show an overlay of my chat convos, so I could be on any desktop and talk to anyone, kind of like how you can answer a text on iOS from a notification if you hold tap on it or whatever. I thought that was next level, then I never saw it again, nor could I figure out how to make it happen again. I think they really were close to making some amazing UIs but due to the nature of Linux neck-beards being slow and repugnant to change (looking at Devuan, Trinity Desktop Environment, MATE, and so on...) I'm sure they opted to remove it. I really would love to see someone just take Ubuntu kind of like how Budgie was inspired by Material Design from Android, and just work on something new that really makes your software a little nicer in terms of being integrated with the Desktop Environment, something I would argue Mobile gets well, and would be a boost for multi-tasking. I really do like Ubuntu Budgie, but it feels kind of incomplete. The most decently integrated DE I can think of is probably KDE since a lot of the apps are made with KDE libraries, and they integrate nicely, you can expect the same behavior out of all of them. I know I kind of went all over the place, I guess my pipedream is to see some companies invest into R&D on Desktop Environments to see what we can do better. I'm really getting sick of Windows again, with all its telemetry but it is a nightmare to get Linux going due to the GPU driver situation, plus I don't want to spend a fortune on a GPU.

parasense 4y ago

I remember at the time the FOSS community found a bunch of prior art that would have most likely invalidate the Microsoft claims. There were plenty of graphical UI in existence that Microsoft probably copied. I do not have links to the epic /. flame-fests on the topic, but perhaps somebody else can find them. Lots of people were sharing links on slashdot with evidence showing how Microsoft would lose.