Conversation

I may not buy a new MBP when this one dies. Realizing I'm starting to avoid working on laptop primarily because the Apple experience is no longer a *pleasant* one for working in a 2021 digital environment. The hardware perf and build quality is not enough to make up for dated UX.
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Computing tools, unlike physical ones like hammers, don't plateau. They have to evolve with the info environment and workflows, and this feels like a highly neglected experience that's a step-sibling to the consumption UX of iOS that is basically a dead end.
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Recently tried a Windows machine again for the first time in years, and it's no better. This whole paradigm of "desktop" UX feels like email -- an annoying, bureaucratic clearing-house locus, where no amount of quality hardware can make up for poor interaction metaphor.
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Replying to
Having experienced the Raspbian desktop briefly, I'm even considering *gasp* going back to a CLI-first unix environment. I'll never be a shell-scripting, emacs-centric ninja type, but I am comfy enough to use it as primary work environment.
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I've never actually used linux for any significant time as a desktop, only as a remote server via SSH. My unix-desktop experience is from Solaris era (my grad school engineering workstations lab went straight from Solaris to Windows).
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But this is not ideal. I don't really enjoy the unix UX either, but it says something that the mac/PC style desktops are getting so dated and clumsy that it's a real alternative now. Linux for the desktop finally arriving via the mainstream desktop experience getting crappy?
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We really need a modern desktop UX metaphor that's more in harmony with how the web experience through a browser has evolved... not sure what I mean by that, but some sort of transparent network-is-the-computer stream metaphor, where I can have my filesystem and cloud it too.
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Basically, I'd like something that feels more like Roam as a desktop OS. A fundamentally modern stream or graph-based network of objects and relations.
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Something that neither patronizingly hides technological expressivity behind a severely dumbed-behind facade, nor is trapped in ancient, baroque, industrial metaphors (document, desktop...). Digital native metaphors should draw from... nature? ecosystems? Forests?
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One solution I'm considering is a heavy duty home server (since I want to get into serious astrophotography image processing and machine learning) paired with a really cheap chromebook
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The server will be a power-hungry-work machine and can be a minimalist linux environment otherwise. Chromebook for mobility, with all writing work done entirely online... basically weaning myself out of the thick desktop world altogether while waiting for someone to reinvent it
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So basically: ✓ heavy-lift server ✓ consumption devices (phone/tablet) ✓ browser-typing heavy device (chromebook) ✓ experimental smart environment ✕ ditch thick desktop environment with "apps"
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Maybe the thick desktop as an environment is basically uncanny valley and dead right now. Caught in the badlands between touch-consumption, servers, and browser-native typing.
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Sadly, this is neither a problem I can solve for myself, nor something some billionaire can throw money at and expect to solve. Historically, good UX paradigms have emerged kinda unpredictably through individual vision (Engelbart and the Ritchie/Thompson basically)
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