Menus, windows, launchers & system trays SUCK. What can we replace them with?

Get the free Cybersecurity Mistakes ebook here: Linux Experiment&utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=social&utm_term=top10misconfigebook Grab a brand new laptop or desktop running Linux: # 👏 SUPPORT THE CHANNEL: Get access to: - a Daily Linux News show - a weekly patroncast for more personal thoughts - polls on the next topics I cover, - your name in the credits YouTube: @thelinuxexp/join Patreon: Or, you can donate whatever you want: Liberapay: 👕 GET TLE MERCH Support the channel AND get cool new gear: 🎙️ LINUX AND OPEN SOURCE NEWS PODCAST: Listen to the latest Linux and open source news, with more in depth coverage, and ad-free! 🏆 FOLLOW ME ELSEWHERE: Website: Mastodon: @thelinuxEXP Pixelfed: PeerTube: Discord: Timecodes 0:00 Intro 0:57 Sponsor: TuxCare 01:54 The Desktop 04:33 Launchers, app grids and start menus 08:03 The System Tray 10:06 Menubars and ribbons 12:54 Windows and titlebars 14:47 Parting Thoughts 15:31 Sponsor: Tuxedo Computers 16:25 Support the channel If you think about productivity, you can’t help but think that having the default state of your computer being an image with a few icons on it is less than stellar. For opening files, it will never be tidy enough to give you access to all you need, you need a launcher or a folder structure, meaning the desktop is bad at this. For opening apps, having visual shortcuts on the desktop is a duplicate of whatever panel or launcher you have. Next are launchers: start menus, app grids, app lists, whatever else. If you think about it, these things aren’t really efficient: you have to either scroll through a list of categories, click one, then click the app you want, or you have to scroll an even longer list of programs sorted by name, which makes no sense since most app names have no relation to what they do. Most of these menus or grids thus added favourites, so you can place your preferred apps in a special place, but in a small menu, you’ll never have enough room. This inefficiency is also why most app grids and menus implement a text field that’s active by default, so you can type the name of the app you’re looking for. Which also is not that great, because it requires you to know the name of the app. Next is the good old system tray: this little area is by far the thing I despise the most in any operating system. Not because it’s useless, because it’s not, but because it’s completely inefficient. You start apps from another place, and some of them will stay in the tray, some won’t. Sometimes the icon disappears when you close the app’s window, sometimes it won’t. Sometimes the icon is coloured, sometimes it’s not. If you have too many things in there, it tends to fold so you have an extra click to view what’s running. Click targets are small and imprecise. It mixes apps and system features. Some apps will react to a right click, some will open a window with a left click, some will open a context menu. The old menus keep evolving, and they’re not getting better. The traditional menubar isn’t great. It’s tiny, click targets aren’t big enough, keyboard navigation is slow, and the sorting of these menus is random and app dependent, meaning you have to learn where each option is for each program you use. If you place that into a global menu, you save some space in the app’s window, and you’re making clicking on menus easier, since they’re always in the same place, but it doesn’t solve the menu sorting problem, and the small click targets. If you place everything in a hamburger menu, you’re simplifying the default interface, but making it harder to find advanced features. Finally, Windows and titlebars. We use app based metaphors, and so we need to have a visual representation of each one. Whether it floats, or it’s tiled, we all have windows that we move, resize, maximize, minimize, or close. Again, this isn’t efficient. Resizing windows to fit a task isn’t great, titlebars are small and finicky to grab and drag, window buttons are small and are moving targets depending on where you placed the window. If you tile things, then you’ll need to adjust the layout multiple times to have tiles that have enough space for what you want to do.