Oct 25, 2014

I think the real reason why I installed Linux on my desktop was because I could customize my desktop environment. When I first started, I knew nothing and everything was amazing. I kept learning and honing my setup until it slowly reached a steady state. It worked well, looked nice and that was it.

Then it just… became boring. Every new screenshot I saw was the same: there’s a menu bar and there are windows. Sometimes they float and sometimes they tile. Half the beauty is in the wallpaper and the colorscheme and nothing felt innovative anymore.

On the other side, movies are portraying computers with these gorgeous sci-fi interfaces. Like absolutely incredible: Tron and Oblivion and Guardians of The Galaxy. Why don’t desktops look like that? They should. I want that.

But when you start to look into it, they’re really damn inflexible. They’re unusable and unnecessary: you have multiple views of the same data on screen, precious real estate going to data that is permanently displayed instead of on request. They are expensive: the entire interface is visually continuous because every program must have a custom design, often animated (an immense increase in effort). And finally the setup is fixed. Window managers have an incredible flexibility in letting you contextually adjust your setup. When I develop I might want two windows open. For browsing, maybe just a single web browser fills the screen. The switch is an unnoticeable press of a few hotkeys, not a hours of piecing together a new interface.

So what I’ve seen people do with their setups is constrained by productivity, but what happens when a bit of this productivity is sacrificed is still vastly unexplored. These CGI interfaces are undeniably beautiful and I am making a project of turning them into reality.

I’ll keep the dev log posted with my progress, maybe writing some longer posts too. I also spend a lot of time finding inspiration for this sort of thing so maybe I can get a Tumblr or repository going for what I find.