Ideas on modernizing the open-source desktop
- ID
- 28240
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 24 Sep 2026, 10:52 AM
- Fetched
- 25 Sep 2026, 3:17 AM
- Provider
- Hacker News
- Category
- dev-community
- Original URL
- https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1095425/2d9f411252325784/
- Source URL
- https://hnrss.org/best
Summary
- Score
- 4.0
- Created
- 25 Sep 2026, 3:18 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- developers
What happened
At Akademy 2026, KDE's annual developer conference, UX veteran Scott Jenson (who says he spent much of his career at Google, including the Chrome team, and now works on Mastodon and Home Assistant) argued that open-source desktop projects should experiment more instead of staying on the WIMP model — windows, icons, menus, pointer. He noted a similar talk last year drew over 500,000 YouTube views, and he brought prototypes to demonstrate. The LWN piece is subscriber-only and the visible excerpt cuts off mid-anecdote about whether Macintosh Finder should place ellipses at the end or middle of truncated filenames.
Why it matters
The concrete content here is thin: the excerpt ends mid-example and the rest is paywalled, so you cannot act on Jenson's actual proposals from this item alone. The usable signal is the 435-comment HN thread and the claim that his earlier talk hit 500k views — if you maintain a Linux desktop app or contribute to KDE/GNOME, that thread is where the counterarguments live, and the one testable idea shown is filename truncation (end vs. middle ellipsis), a small default you could actually prototype and measure rather than debate.
Discussion angle
Take the one concrete example in the excerpt — truncating a long filename with an end ellipsis versus a middle ellipsis — and ask whether anyone in the room has changed a single UI default based on user testing rather than opinion. Then discuss why understaffed open-source projects struggle to prototype at all.