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Ideas on modernizing the open-source desktop
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Scott Jenson has been working on user interfaces (UIs) and user experience (UX)
for many years at Apple, Google, and other companies. Now, he's trying to convince
open-source projects to experiment more and drive the desktop beyond the age-old "windows, icons, menus,
pointer" (WIMP) model. At Akademy 2026, KDE's annual developer
conference, he shared his complaints and ideas in a talk aimed
at convincing those in attendance to take the lead on desktop design.
He introduced himself as someone who has been doing UX for a long time, much
of that time at Google. He said that over that time he had noticed a cultural shift,
"because back in 2005 when I joined, we weren't evil; we were really trying to do the
right thing". He had worked on the Chrome team for a while, which he said was
"filled with people who wanted nothing but open-source, open-web"
projects. Things had changed radically, which led him to leave Google, "but I'm
trying to atone for my sins working for these companies".
He now does work for Mastodon and Home Assistant, "just kind of trying to
squeeze a little bit more good UX design into open source". Jenson said he did
not want to be confrontational, but he thought that open source needs a lot of help
in the area of UX design. That is challenging, because open-source projects are
understaffed.
He was at Akademy to discuss his ideas because he had given a talk
similar to this at Ubuntu's conference last year, which proved to be popular. "It
got more than half a million views on YouTube—which by YouTube standards is
trivial, but by Scott standards is enormous." That told him that the topic of
desktop UX was something that people wanted to talk about. This time around, he also
wanted to show a few examples of prototypes he had to demonstrate his ideas.
He thinks that desktop UX is very different from other kinds of UX. Jenson related
a story about working on the Macintosh's Finder application, which is a file
manager. The team "wanted to do ellipses" in file names when showing a file in
the Finder that had a name too long to display in its entirety. The developers wanted
to put the ellipsis at the end of the file name, but he thought that would lose
too much information, and suggested that the ellipses should be in the middle of the
file names. "It's now considered to be one of those things that's an exciting
little attention-to-detail issue the Macintosh does."
Another UX detail that he worked on is the way that clicking and dragging files
from one window to another works on the Mac. A mouse click action has two parts: when
the user depresses the button (mouse down) and when the user releases the button
(mouse up). On the Mac, item selection happens on mouse down, but the window only
raises on the mouse up action. In other words, if a user drags an icon from a Finder
window into another window, the first window is not raised.
On most Linux systems, though, if a user is trying to click and drag a file from a
window in the background it will cause the window to raise as soon as the user does
the "mouse down" action. That complicates trying to click and drag a file from one
window to another. That is a fundamental action that means that users can't move data
into applications quite as easily on Linux as they can on the Mac.
He said that he had talked about that issue two years ago on Mastodon, which
raised a response from a KDE developer who thought it was a good idea to separate the
mouse down and mouse up actions when dragging data between windows. Then they
implemented it a few hours later.
"I forgot who that was. So if anybody here did that", he said, but before
he could finish the sentence a voice from somewhere in t