Desktop UI has barely budged since WIMP became the dominant paradigm in the 80s. There have always been alternatives (Oberon, rio, Cedar, zoomable UIs, etc.), b

Desktop UI has barely budged since WIMP became the dominant paradigm in the 80s. There have always been alternatives (Oberon, rio, Cedar, zoomable UIs, etc.), but they've never had any widespread adoption. As of more recent, there have been attempts by various parties (Microsoft, GNOME, Canonical...) to create these tablet-centric, opaque but outwardly simple UIs that are positioned as being groundbreaking and challenging norms, but in reality are some subset of WIMP with certain properties being given more weight than others (e.g. menus and icons over windows and pointers), but with little in the way of any true improvements in discoverability and interaction. Nothing like how all the text on screen is programmable, like in Oberon. That's groundbreaking. Because the desktop shell is what most people ever see, it's a decent proxy for programmers to use providing an illusion of change and progress.