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Wayland desktop for Linux with skeuomorphic design

162 points FinalDestiny 2 hours ago 55 comments

uolmir 1 hour ago | parent

This is very funny. But I think it would make me feel like I was working inside of Papers Please or some similar game.

PanicAdmin 1 hour ago | parent

I see that this very bad idea is returning from the 90's.

brink 1 hour ago | parent

What's so bad about it?

exe34 8 minutes ago | parent

He doesn't like it.

austinthetaco 1 hour ago | parent

I reckon a lot of the people clamoring for these things are gen z or younger first discovering the idea of customizable OS's and are now going through all the awful decisions that were made before. Pretty sure I've seen a version of this skeuomorphic desktop like 15 times at this point.

ChrisMarshallNY 24 minutes ago | parent

In the last century, there was an app for Apple's Mac OS (before MacOSX), called Kaleidoscope[0]. It allowed massive customization.

Fun, but most themes were basically unusable.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaleidoscope_(software)

Some samples: https://web.archive.org/web/20110709175639fw_/http://www.kal...

(The one I used the most, was Ozymandias II).

ChrisMarshallNY 29 minutes ago | parent

Personally, I found skeuomorphic design to be something that I really enjoyed, for a couple of days, but rapidly got sick of.

That may have more to with the skills of the implementors, as opposed to the concept, as a whole.

I do find modern "flat" design to be less "fun," but I get a lot more done with it.

sixothree 20 minutes ago | parent

That might be the thing. In real life you don't use the same stationary for years. Your desk is a reflection of your mood and evolves almost daily. Maybe that's where these fail?

seemaze 1 hour ago | parent

Man, first Felix Reiseberg[0], then OpenCode 2.0[1], and now this in the last 24 hrs. Really giving off heavy Myst vibes. They are briefly interesting encounters, buy I deeply hope this isn't a legitimate UI trend.

It's hardly even skeuomorphism, it's a almost digital twin rendered with Phong.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50082470

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50094994

ranger_danger 1 hour ago | parent

Yes! Please bring back the soul we had with retro OS GUIs (and the speed)... it's time for a resurgence. Especially with new systems/RAM/GPUs/etc. not being a thing for quite a while for a lot of people now.

RugnirViking 1 hour ago | parent

the "paper windows" idea doesn't seem to have been done with as much soul as the rest of the ui. Just a turned up corner. I reckon something done there could really tie this togetjer

alehlopeh 58 minutes ago | parent

A “dog-eared corner” in fact. The readme is painful to read if you have an aversion to Claude prose.

Retr0id 50 minutes ago | parent

fwiw that is the standard term for that kind of fold (to the extent that it has its own wikipedia article), but I agree that the claude prose is gross.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_ears

lelanthran 6 minutes ago | parent

I only skimmed the README, but I didn't notice any Claudisms.

I could read it comfortably, whereas usually I can't make it through even a paragraph from an LLM.

esperent 1 hour ago | parent

I love this, at least from the screenshots. I'll test it out tomorrow. I hope this kind of design makes a comeback.

acheron 1 hour ago | parent

Fantastic. Giving me memories of MS Bob. Put a talking animal assistant in the corner and you’ve got it. Oh, and you could connect the assistant to an LLM of course.

cogman10 30 minutes ago | parent

Exactly what it reminded me of. Although a lot more functional.

nntwozz 1 hour ago | parent

Flashback to TabWorks.

Compaq Presario 486 1994, I was 10.

And yes, played Myst on it.

Tempus fugit…

xbar 55 minutes ago | parent

Did it have that tiny rollerball on the side?

We bought a bunch of TabWorks-based Compaqs back then for a medical office where I was doing IT work. I thought it was slick at the time.

iamnothere 1 hour ago | parent

This is neat, it’s not for me (I prefer extreme minimalism) but I could see how some would prefer it. I like how we’re getting more desktop options now thanks to wlroots.

bovermyer 1 hour ago | parent

I love this. Hopefully we start to see more experiments like this.

cr125rider 31 minutes ago | parent

I like when designers are creative.

brink 1 hour ago | parent

This is lovely. I really hope society returns to chasing beauty again. We need it.

xbar 57 minutes ago | parent

Love it. Maximize skeuomorphic design.

bmurphy1976 56 minutes ago | parent

I want more stuff like this. The era 20 years ago (e.g. Enlightenment) was way more fun than the bland monotonic design we have these days. If you like bland modern design, great, that should be an option as well, but we should still have good variety.

anonzzzies 37 minutes ago | parent

I look back at my Enlightenment desktop with joy. I guess many people hated all the tinkering with drivers & settings etc, but I loved it. Spending a few weekends getting a computer running with Linux and Enlightenment exactly like I wanted it to and then actually using that as my main driver for years are very nice memories.

lelanthran 13 minutes ago | parent

> Spending a few weekends getting a computer running with Linux and Enlightenment exactly like I wanted it to and then actually using that as my main driver for years are very nice memories.

Years? The novelty wore off in a week with Enlightenment's constant crashing :-(

Anyway, I look forward to more Window Managers (Hell, even a whole DE) that put the fun and whimsy back into computing.

Sohcahtoa82 35 minutes ago | parent

> If you like bland modern design, great,

I don't know why anybody would. It takes all the lessons we learned about UX from user testing in the late 90s/early 00s and throws it all away to produce something that looks "clean" and "sleek", at the cost of being useful. Discoverability? Who needs it?

EDIT: Though I do enjoy skeuomorphism, I do think the TFA goes a bit too far.

Zigurd 28 minutes ago | parent

Debatable. IIRC Bell labs conducted a study of whether Unix command names should be changed to something more meaningful than cat, sed, grep etc.

They found that words that convey some meaning related to what the command does had little or no effect on the user remembering what the command does. I strongly suspect skeuomorphism similarly has no claim on functional advantage.

Discoverability is good, but it's probably got a little to do with the icon.

lelanthran 9 minutes ago | parent

> I strongly suspect skeuomorphism similarly has no claim on functional advantage.

I think it does, but for new users only. I hate playing the "is-this-a-button" on modern designs, not knowing what is clickable and what is not. Other games I hate:

- Lets find the scrollbar

- Guess which window has focus

- (Windows-only) Try to predict the application to get focus on alt-tab, then alt-tab again.

- How do I find the file that just downloaded?

roughly 17 minutes ago | parent

Re: too far - it’s interesting, because there’s two reasons skeumorphism “works” - one is because it provides visual cues for how a virtual object will behave when acted upon, which lets our brain build a quick intuitive understanding of how to interact with a foreign object that draws on all our experience outside the computer, and two is because the visual mimicry of the physical object gives our brains immediate cues to understand what it’s seeing and build that interaction model.

This one absolutely over indexes on that second principle, to a borderline cartoonish degree, but I expect the reason it’s resonating so hard is exactly what you’re indicating, that in the industry’s desire to be able to move on from the tether to the shapes of physical objects, they discarded that first principle entirely, instead of figuring out how to maintain the visual cues to form and operation in a new language.

(Here’s where I throw away all that credibility I just got from the prior two paragraphs: I actually think Liquid Glass is getting closer to a “skeumorphism without skeumorphism” than anything else I’ve seen out there.)

pkulak 9 minutes ago | parent

> I don't know why anybody would.

Well, there's really two things going on here: consumer vs professional. Does an electrician need to "discover" the modes on her multimeter? Naw. Do I need to discover where the wiper controls are on the car I just rented? Absolutely! But I'm not a huge fan of UI fluff that helps me discover things on my work machine.

javier2 34 minutes ago | parent

e16/e17 was a lot of fun, and it was fast.

Beijinger 32 minutes ago | parent

e17 (Moksha) IS still fun!

https://www.bodhilinux.com/moksha-desktop/

Beijinger 33 minutes ago | parent

What do you mean 20 years ago? I still use enlightenment today (Moksha Desktop)

pkulak 15 minutes ago | parent

As someone who runs a super-boring, stock tiler with zero decoration or bling; couldn't agree more. It's this kind of thing that gets new users interested in Linux. _I_ started using Linux because I saw some video of wobbly windows, and desktops on a giant rotating cube.

theraido 12 minutes ago | parent

It's probably not the same one, but I suddenly had Project Looking Glass flashbacks

0xbadcafebee 9 minutes ago | parent

[delayed]

Retr0id 52 minutes ago | parent

> the kind iOS 6 had

> The room is ray-traced

imho, part of the charm of iOS6 was that everything was baked into native-resolution textures.

ramijames 20 minutes ago | parent

I feel like that was simply a limitation of the hardware at the time. Given modern hardware, I'm willing to bet that people of the 2000s would have made wild stuff.

jacknews 43 minutes ago | parent

How come the 'documents' are floating above the wood surface creating such deep drop shadows?

KerrAvon 40 minutes ago | parent

okay, now use this for a month and report back

I don't hate skeuomorphic design but come on man

shaolinspirit 33 minutes ago | parent

fascinating, I recently was also exploring various skeuomorphic design pattern in Flutter and now this!

ragazzina 31 minutes ago | parent

> Windows are sheets of paper on a walnut desk.

The calculator is a sheet of paper..

Beijinger 30 minutes ago | parent

memory 4 GB (DEsk itself 200-450 MB)

This makes it interesting. I may try it out. Moksha uses 200 MB to 300 MB of RAM

DonHopkins 23 minutes ago | parent

In Brett Victor's 2011 essay, "A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design", he laid out the foundation for his critique of skeuomorphic design. He believes hands are our future.

https://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDes...

On the visual pretense: "Pictures Under Glass sacrifice all the tactile richness of working with our hands, offering instead a hokey visual facade."

On touchscreens mimicking real objects without haptics: "Pictures Under Glass is an interaction paradigm of permanent numbness. It's a Novocaine drip to the wrist. It denies our hands what they do best."

On why this design path is short-sighted: "To me, claiming that Pictures Under Glass is the future of interaction is like claiming that black-and-white is the future of photography. It's obviously a transitional technology. And the sooner we transition, the better."

Arubis 17 minutes ago | parent

I can feel my shoulders unlocking looking at the screenshots.

lelanthran 17 minutes ago | parent

This is pretty cool! I'd use this, once out of beta.

(Bonus points for not throwing AI-tells at everyone in the README - much appreciated).

mrsssnake 15 minutes ago | parent

Skeuomorphic design was a solution to teaching the customer how to use the digital product, but I wish we have more of its side effects like shadows, icons that pop and other things that are pleasant for the eye and depth.

I don't know if it's just because it was better or am I just tired of the current white (like #FFFFFF white) backgrounds with everything flat and not connected. I would like my browser tabs to be in the shape of a physical tab in notebooks.

treetalker 14 minutes ago | parent

> DEsk is Desktop Environment and desk in one word

They dropped the ball:

DESk would have been Desktop Environment, desk, and Skeumorphic in one word.

lpghatguy 9 minutes ago | parent

The README being so full of AI prose is super grating.

mrsssnake 8 minutes ago | parent

The thing I hate with vibed apps the most is zero seconds spend on how things around what is being build are already structured and what problems was already solved, just focusing on shiny result.

`sudo sh scripts/install_debian.sh`, a 583 lines long script, basically now a whole software just to handle the installation of this project on one distribution, seriously? If we vibecode already, just do the normal packaging.

V__ 6 minutes ago | parent

I can imagine this being really helpful for beginners and kids. It's hard to grok what windows and tabs are etc. without any context.

diegolas 6 minutes ago | parent

god please no