Ideas on modernizing the open-source desktop
Ideas on modernizing the open-source desktop
关于现代化开源桌面的构想
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. Scott Jenson 曾在苹果、谷歌及其他公司从事用户界面（UI）和用户体验（UX）工作多年。如今，他正试图说服开源项目进行更多实验，推动桌面系统超越古老的“窗口、图标、菜单、指针”（WIMP）模型。在 2026 年 KDE 年度开发者大会 Akademy 上，他分享了自己的不满与构想，旨在说服与会者在桌面设计领域发挥引领作用。
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”. 他介绍自己是一位长期从事 UX 工作的人，其中大部分时间是在谷歌度过的。他表示，在那段时间里他注意到了一种文化转变，“因为 2005 年我加入时，我们并不邪恶；我们确实在努力做正确的事”。他曾在 Chrome 团队工作过一段时间，他说那里“充满了只想做开源和开放网络项目的人”。后来情况发生了剧变，这促使他离开了谷歌，“但我正试图为我在这些公司工作所犯下的罪过赎罪”。他现在为 Mastodon 和 Home Assistant 工作，“只是想在开源领域多挤出一点好的 UX 设计”。
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. Jenson 表示他不想采取对抗态度，但他认为开源在 UX 设计领域需要大量帮助。这很有挑战性，因为开源项目普遍人手不足。
Innovation
创新
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. 他来到 Akademy 讨论他的想法，是因为他去年在 Ubuntu 大会上做过类似的演讲，且反响热烈。“它在 YouTube 上获得了超过 50 万次观看——以 YouTube 的标准来看这微不足道，但以 Scott 的标准来看这非常巨大。”这告诉他，桌面 UX 是人们想要探讨的话题。这一次，他还想展示几个原型示例来演示他的想法。他认为桌面 UX 与其他类型的 UX 有很大不同。
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.” Jenson 讲述了他在 Macintosh 的 Finder（文件管理器）应用工作时的故事。当文件名过长无法完整显示时，团队“想要使用省略号”。开发人员想把省略号放在文件名末尾，但他认为那样会丢失太多信息，于是建议将省略号放在文件名中间。“这现在被认为是 Macintosh 在细节处理上令人兴奋的小亮点之一。”
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. 他参与的另一个 UX 细节是 Mac 上从一个窗口点击并拖动文件到另一个窗口的方式。鼠标点击动作分为两部分：按下按钮（鼠标按下）和松开按钮（鼠标松开）。在 Mac 上，项目选择发生在鼠标按下时，但窗口仅在鼠标松开时才会置顶。换句话说，如果用户将图标从 Finder 窗口拖到另一个窗口，第一个窗口不会被置顶。然而，在大多数 Linux 系统上，如果用户试图从后台窗口点击并拖动文件，窗口会在用户执行“鼠标按下”动作时立即置顶。这使得从一个窗口点击并拖动文件到另一个窗口变得复杂。
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 the room responded, “you’re welcome”. Jenson yelled “thank you! I’ve been wanting to meet you for two years!” That was an example, he said, of how open source can be awesome: someone can just say “that’s a good idea, I’ll just do it” and then rapidly implement and push the feature to the project. 他说两年前曾在 Mastodon 上讨论过这个问题，一位 KDE 开发者回应称，在窗口间拖动数据时分离鼠标按下和松开动作是个好主意。随后他们几小时内就实现了它。“我忘了那是谁。所以如果这里有人做了这件事，”他说。但他还没说完，房间里就有人回应道：“不客气。”Jenson 大喊：“谢谢！我两年来一直想见你！”他说，这就是开源为何如此棒的一个例子：有人可以说“这是个好主意，我来做”，然后迅速实现并将该功能推送到项目中。
Stabilized
趋于稳定
The point he was really trying to make, though, is that the desktop UX had not really changed in 20 years. There were plenty of new ideas and improvements in the 1980s and 1990s, “and then it just stabilized, and not much has really changed”. But people are doing much more with their computers today, and he thinks that there are ways for desktop UX to grow. Much of the UX for Linux systems was originally copied from Windows and the Mac, “KDE even says it’s for Windows users, that it wants to be similar to Windows for users”. 然而，他真正想表达的观点是，桌面 UX 在过去 20 年里并没有真正改变。在 80 年代和 90 年代，有很多新想法和改进，“然后它就稳定下来了，没再发生什么实质性变化”。但今天人们使用电脑做的事情比以前多得多，他认为桌面 UX 还有发展的空间。Linux 系统的许多 UX 最初是从 Windows 和 Mac 复制过来的，“KDE 甚至说它是为 Windows 用户准备的，希望对用户来说与 Windows 相似”。
There’s nothing wrong with that, but he felt that the Linux community “in general” had been leaning on Microsoft and Apple to do all of the UX research and testing, “and frankly, [make] the mistakes”. Some might point out that GNOME has conducted user research for some of its design changes, and KDE’s human-interface guidelines (HIG) were also developed based on research by its contributors. However, it would be fair to say that these are exceptions rather than the norm; certainly, no one is funding or conducting regular UX design research and development for the Linux desktop overall. 这本身没有错，但他觉得 Linux 社区“总体上”一直依赖微软和苹果来完成所有的 UX 研究和测试，“坦率地说，是让他们去犯错”。有些人可能会指出，GNOME 曾为其部分设计变更进行过用户研究，KDE 的人机交互指南（HIG）也是基于贡献者的研究开发的。然而，公平地说，这些只是例外而非惯例；当然，目前没有人为整个 Linux 桌面的 UX 设计研究与开发提供资金或进行常规工作。
He said that it is smart to let Apple and Microsoft do these things first “so we can draft behind them”, but the problem is that “they’ve just kind of given up to an extent”. Apple has been letting its desktop UX, and desktop hardware, “languish for years and years and years” because it had shifted its focus to the iPhone and iPad devices. “I mean, like, Apple wanted the Mac to die. They wanted the world to move over to the iPad. Guess what? It didn’t.” 他说，让苹果和微软先做这些事情“以便我们能跟在他们后面（利用其成果）”是明智的，但问题是“他们在某种程度上已经放弃了”。苹果一直让其桌面 UX 和桌面硬件“荒废了多年”，因为它已将重心转移到了 iPhone 和 iPad 设备上。“我的意思是，苹果曾希望 Mac 消亡。他们希望世界转向 iPad。结果呢？并没有。”