Ask HN: What's the next evolution of the GUI OS?
I think GUI has evolved too far, what I want is devolution, not back to what came before, but back to other basics.<p>We&#x27;re in a terrible state, some odd and ugly place between native and online, where even native apps are picking the worst from online and online is denied access from the best of native.<p>I want an operating system GUI that dictates the available widgets to the program, and hands me control of their presentation, I don&#x27;t want applications, online nor native to be able to dictate their own look, only for them to present their available functionality to the OS, and have the OS compose the screens for me, probably guided by my predefined preferences, sort of how HTML could have been if CSS hadn&#x27;t ruined the day, sort of how native winforms programs used to be done.<p>A concrete example is things that can save a file, I don&#x27;t want the program to dictate the gui for this, I want it to keep the OS updated &quot;I have these documents open which have been changed since last save&quot; or &quot;There are these things which can be printed&quot;, and have the OS dictate GUI for activating that functionality.. It used to LOOK that way, for a lot of things, you&#x27;d go to the file menubar, and there you would open&#x2F;save&#x2F;print your file, this was easy to learn and very consistent..<p>Currently, the most consistent interface experience on my computer is bash in xterm, in elinks, websites look pretty consistent, if they&#x27;re well designed.<p>But if I open firefox, chrome, gimp and kate, nothing looks or feels the same..
Then I open blender and a fifth kind of interface appears. No thanks.<p>So I sort of agree with you that it&#x27;d be nice if we did away with the window metaphor to some degree.. But I was also no fan of the way Mac had the &quot;god bar&quot; at top (which I believe Ubuntu did too) terrible idea..<p>For now, the least crappy desktop experience for me is i3, but it does not change anything fundamental, it&#x27;s still program windows, free to do whatever they want.<p>But, for some things, the most futuristic version of the environment is the one that does not need a screen.. The tasks that are silently done for you without needing you to transfer any significant amount of information between you and the machine, or being able to do so on another level than a screen (brain machine interfaces and whatnot)