4 ms·

Desktop is dead. Gamers will move to consoles and Valve-like platforms. Rest of productivity is done on a single window browser anyway. Llms will accelerate thi

Desktop is dead. Gamers will move to consoles and Valve-like platforms. Rest of productivity is done on a single window browser anyway. Llms will accelerate this Coders are the only ones who still should be interested in desktop UX, but even in that segment many just need a terminal window.

snovv_crash 10mo ago
For content consumption sure. For content creation though, desktop still rules.
- immibis 10mo ago
  Sounds like a dead market. Nobody needs to create content any more now that we have AI.
linguae 10mo ago
Is it dead because people don’t want the desktop, or is it dead because Big Tech won’t invest in the desktop beyond what’s necessary for their business? Whether intentional or not, it seems like the trend is increasingly locked-down devices running locked-down software, and I’m also disturbed by the prospect of Big Tech gobbling up hardware (see the RAM shortage, for example), making it unaffordable for regular people, and then renting this hardware back to us in the form of cloud services. It’s disturbing and I wish we could stop this.
- xnx 10mo ago
  Desktop is all about collaboration and interaction with other apps. The ideal of every contemporary SaaS is that you can never download your "files" so you stay locked in.
  - vjvjvjvjghv 10mo ago
    Exactly. Interoperability is not cool anymore. You need to lock users in
- PunchyHamster 10mo ago
  MS invests in actively making desktop experience. But outside of that I doubt there will be many users actually doing stuff (as opposed to just ingesting content) that will abandon desktop, and other ones like Mac UI isn't getting worse
  - hulitu 10mo ago
    > MS invests in actively making desktop experience. ... shitty.
- rustcleaner 10mo ago
  Digital sovereignty is woefully undertaught. Things like FOSS software, cryptography and its many uses, digital rights management, ownership rights, right to repair, etc. We are turning computers into monkey-friendly appliance devices, when we should be molding tiny humans into digitally sovereign supermonkeys on advanced universal computation devices. How does anyone graduate high school not having heard of the Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange? In my ideal, that would not happen. Students taught properly in digital sovereignty should be extremely difficult to surveil or control digitally with almost any kind of local, network, or service lock. This is a good thing, we want digital barbarian warriors and not digital slaves.
hollerith 10mo ago
>productivity is done on a single window browser anyway When I need to get productive, sometimes I disable the browser to stop myself from wasting time on the web.
- whatever1 10mo ago
  And you likely open the browser that happens to be called VS Code, Figma etc
  - hollerith 10mo ago
    The point though is that my vscode window does not have an address bar I can use to visit Youtube or Pornhub at any time. I guess the larger point is that you need a desktop to run vscode or Figma, so the desktop is not dead.
sprash 10mo ago
It's not dead. It's being murdered. Microsoft, Apple, Gnome and KDE are making the experience worse with each update. Productive work becomes a chore. And the last thing we need is more experiments. We need more performance, responsiveness, consistency and less latency. Everything got worse on all 4 points for every desktop environment despite hardware getting faster by several orders of magnitude. This also means that I heavily disagree with one of the points of the presenter. We should not use the next gen hardware to develop for the future Desktop. This is the most nonsensical thing I heard all day. We need to focus on the basics.
- silisili 10mo ago
  I agree with this. I remember when Gnome 3 came out, there were a lot of legitimate complaints that were handwaved away by the developers as "doesn't work well on a mobile interface", despite Gnome having approximately zero install cases onto anything mobile. AFAICT that probably hasn't changed, all these years later.
  - WD-42 10mo ago
    I don’t know. I just started distributing a gtk app and I’ve already gotten two issue reports from people using it on mobile experiencing usability problems. Not something I thought I’d have to worry about when I started but I guess they are out there.
- kvemkon 10mo ago
  > Gnome I can't imagine what I'd be doing without MATE (GNOME 2 fork ported to GTK+ 3). Recently I've stumbled upon: > I suspect that distro maintainers may feel we've lost too many team members so are going with an older known quantity. [1] This sounds disturbing. [1] https://github.com/mate-desktop/caja/issues/1863#issuecomment-3590336800 https://github.com/mate-desktop/caja/issues/1863#issuecommen...
- vortext 10mo ago
  KDE? It has great performance, it's highly configurable, and it's been improving. Many people don't seem to like GNOME 3, but it has also been getting better, in my view. I agree Windows and macOS have been getting worse.
shmerl 10mo ago
No, thanks. I'm a gamer but I don't need a console like UX as the only option.

snovv_crash 10mo ago

For content consumption sure. For content creation though, desktop still rules.

immibis 10mo ago
Sounds like a dead market. Nobody needs to create content any more now that we have AI.

linguae 10mo ago

Is it dead because people don’t want the desktop, or is it dead because Big Tech won’t invest in the desktop beyond what’s necessary for their business? Whether intentional or not, it seems like the trend is increasingly locked-down devices running locked-down software, and I’m also disturbed by the prospect of Big Tech gobbling up hardware (see the RAM shortage, for example), making it unaffordable for regular people, and then renting this hardware back to us in the form of cloud services. It’s disturbing and I wish we could stop this.

xnx 10mo ago
Desktop is all about collaboration and interaction with other apps. The ideal of every contemporary SaaS is that you can never download your "files" so you stay locked in.
- vjvjvjvjghv 10mo ago
  Exactly. Interoperability is not cool anymore. You need to lock users in
PunchyHamster 10mo ago
MS invests in actively making desktop experience. But outside of that I doubt there will be many users actually doing stuff (as opposed to just ingesting content) that will abandon desktop, and other ones like Mac UI isn't getting worse
- hulitu 10mo ago
  > MS invests in actively making desktop experience. ... shitty.
rustcleaner 10mo ago
Digital sovereignty is woefully undertaught. Things like FOSS software, cryptography and its many uses, digital rights management, ownership rights, right to repair, etc. We are turning computers into monkey-friendly appliance devices, when we should be molding tiny humans into digitally sovereign supermonkeys on advanced universal computation devices. How does anyone graduate high school not having heard of the Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange? In my ideal, that would not happen. Students taught properly in digital sovereignty should be extremely difficult to surveil or control digitally with almost any kind of local, network, or service lock. This is a good thing, we want digital barbarian warriors and not digital slaves.

hollerith 10mo ago

>productivity is done on a single window browser anyway When I need to get productive, sometimes I disable the browser to stop myself from wasting time on the web.

whatever1 10mo ago
And you likely open the browser that happens to be called VS Code, Figma etc
- hollerith 10mo ago
  The point though is that my vscode window does not have an address bar I can use to visit Youtube or Pornhub at any time. I guess the larger point is that you need a desktop to run vscode or Figma, so the desktop is not dead.

sprash 10mo ago

It's not dead. It's being murdered. Microsoft, Apple, Gnome and KDE are making the experience worse with each update. Productive work becomes a chore. And the last thing we need is more experiments. We need more performance, responsiveness, consistency and less latency. Everything got worse on all 4 points for every desktop environment despite hardware getting faster by several orders of magnitude. This also means that I heavily disagree with one of the points of the presenter. We should not use the next gen hardware to develop for the future Desktop. This is the most nonsensical thing I heard all day. We need to focus on the basics.

silisili 10mo ago
I agree with this. I remember when Gnome 3 came out, there were a lot of legitimate complaints that were handwaved away by the developers as "doesn't work well on a mobile interface", despite Gnome having approximately zero install cases onto anything mobile. AFAICT that probably hasn't changed, all these years later.
- WD-42 10mo ago
  I don’t know. I just started distributing a gtk app and I’ve already gotten two issue reports from people using it on mobile experiencing usability problems. Not something I thought I’d have to worry about when I started but I guess they are out there.
kvemkon 10mo ago
> Gnome I can't imagine what I'd be doing without MATE (GNOME 2 fork ported to GTK+ 3). Recently I've stumbled upon: > I suspect that distro maintainers may feel we've lost too many team members so are going with an older known quantity. [1] This sounds disturbing. [1] https://github.com/mate-desktop/caja/issues/1863#issuecomment-3590336800 https://github.com/mate-desktop/caja/issues/1863#issuecommen...
vortext 10mo ago
KDE? It has great performance, it's highly configurable, and it's been improving. Many people don't seem to like GNOME 3, but it has also been getting better, in my view. I agree Windows and macOS have been getting worse.

shmerl 10mo ago

No, thanks. I'm a gamer but I don't need a console like UX as the only option.