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this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2026
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“Program Manager wasn’t broken” doesn’t really contradict “don’t fix what isn’t broken.”
The point isn’t that interfaces should never change. It’s that changes should solve identifiable problems. Program Manager eventually stopped scaling well to how people were actually using computers, and the taskbar/start menu ux we all use today solved most of those problems. It took iterations, but we've got something pretty solid these days as compared to Windows 3.11.
If you think the current desktop UX has equivalent problems, identify them. “We’ve used this paradigm for a long time” is not itself a reason to replace it.
we have multiple different paradigms today, but due to how big the market is and how big the fraction of people who're not interested in exploring the space is, the only places the innovation happens is in labs. there aren't any ux user studies on an os-level anymore.
except the "desktop" and "buttons on a grid" modes of operation, the biggest one is "scrolling app", followed waaaaaay down by things like tiling interfaces and whatever the hell gnome is doing. there are multiple interesting ideas down there, like the "infinite whiteboard" of oberon or "zui" of eaglemode, or even the "composable widget toolbox" of arcan. it's just that they will never seem use outside a few hundred users at most because they are so different. nobody is interested in checking if users prefer them because the users are also the developers and there's no budget behind them.
It's not that there is no interest. It is that the current paradigm adequately solves the problems for the vast majority of users. Oberons infinite whiteboard will gain market share when it solves a problem users actually have.
I repeat, do not fix what is not broken.
this is "invisible hand of the free market" reasoning. oberon has been around since the 80's, in use at some universities because it solves problems users there have. the reason it has no market share is that nobody else knows about it and because of aggressive marketing by microsoft over the years.
You're not digesting the content of what I am saying; I'll just end up repeating myself, so I am disengaging with you here. Cheers.