desktop environment

A one-minute demo of Safespaces, an open source 3D and VR desktop built on the Arcan project.

A 27c3 talk on the Linux desktop (GNOME) by Wolfgang Draxinger, repeatedly interrupted and corrected by Lennart Poettering from the audience. The description notes much of the talk's content is disputed.

Scott Jenson, a veteran UX designer formerly at Apple and Google, argues that the 'UX/UI' split pits programmers against designers and narrows ambition in open source. He makes the case that desktop UX has stagnated and that open source projects could lead experimentation beyond current interaction models.

A short screen recording of an Ubuntu Karmic Koala desktop running KDE4 with Compiz Fusion 3D cube effects and CairoDock.

An 8-minute clip of George Carlin's 1992 stand-up bit on the environment, arguing the planet will be fine and it is people who are in trouble. It leans on the contrast between Earth's 4.5 billion years and humanity's 200,000.

Excerpts from Linus Torvalds's DebConf 14 talk on why desktop Linux struggles. He covers application distribution, distros breaking backwards compatibility, wasted package management effort and how Windows does app distribution better.

Linus Tech Tips starts a series in which Linus and Luke move their home workstations to Linux. This episode has each pick a distro and try to get a game running on it, and Linus ends up breaking his Pop!_OS install.

A short demo of Sun Microsystems' Looking Glass, a 3D desktop GUI concept for a future operating system.

A 2007 side-by-side demo comparing Windows Vista's Aero interface with Ubuntu running Beryl/Compiz, showing effects such as the desktop cube and burning windows.

Accursed Farms' hour-plus critique of the modern desktop GUI. It argues that current interfaces are a regression from older designs such as Windows 7 and proposes principles for better ones.

George Carlin's stand-up routine arguing the planet will be fine and it is people who are in trouble. It mocks the idea of saving the planet.

Eric Bier, a PARC research scientist, demonstrates the Cedar integrated programming environment and language, an evolution of Mesa from Xerox PARC. The demo shows the Tioga editor, garbage collection, and a full graphical workstation environment.

Utah State plant scientist Bruce Bugbee presents his analysis of the energy and environmental costs of vertical and indoor farming. He argues artificial lighting cannot compete with sunlight in fields or greenhouses.

Engineering Explained works through whether electric cars are really worse for the environment than gasoline cars. It covers battery production emissions, the electricity mix used to charge, and how long an EV takes to break even on lifetime emissions.

A KQED Truly CA documentary narrated by John Waters about the Salton Sea, a once-glamorous California vacation spot now home to an eccentric community. It covers the area's economic, political and environmental problems and features Salvation Mountain.

Smalltalk pioneer Dan Ingalls presents the Lively Kernel at JSConf US 2012, a live, direct-manipulation programming environment running in the browser. He shows drag-and-drop building of live objects on the web.

Joseph Everett compares the food environment of the US, with roughly 30% obesity, to Japan's, around 3.5%. He argues that what is available and normal to eat explains much of the gap.

Arthur Keller gives a roughly half-hour crash course on environmental collapse, covering exponential growth, carrying capacity and ecological overshoot.

A Kurzgesagt animated explainer on the climate and environmental cost of meat. It covers how beef drives deforestation and emissions, and how this compares with plant-based foods.

A Kurzgesagt animated explainer on meat: why people love it and what it costs animals, the environment and health. It lays out the complicated trade-offs of meat production and consumption.

TJ DeVries coins the term PDE (Personalized Development Environment) to describe editors like Neovim that you shape to your own workflow. He contrasts this with out-of-the-box IDEs and discusses why customizable tools appeal to developers.

Jessie Frazelle's DockerCon SF 2015 talk on running Docker containers for desktop applications, with fun container hacks and images. It shows how far containers can be pushed beyond servers.

Andrew Kelley's Zig SHOWTIME talk on an experiment to ship static Linux executables that can do graphics and gaming, followed by an interview. It covers the problems of Linux binary stability, dynamic linking and the graphics ABI.

A Computer History Museum demonstration with Dan Ingalls of Smalltalk-76 running on a Xerox Alto, recorded in 2017. He shows the live environment and discusses the system.

Tudor Girba's Curry On! 2019 talk on moldable development, the idea that developers should build custom tools and views for each software system they work on. It draws on the Pharo and Glamorous Toolkit environments.

Not Just Bikes explains why living in a dense, bikeable Dutch city sharply reduced his family's environmental footprint and improved quality of life. It is a collaboration that continues on Climate Town.

Linus Tech Tips covers Framework's newly announced devices, including its first desktop, with comments from Framework's CEO about the company's design decisions.

Ruby developer Avdi Grimm gives a seven-minute tour of Pharo Smalltalk's development environment, focusing on tools like search-by-example and the integrated, live coding experience.

Jack Rusher's Strange Loop 2022 talk argues that most programming languages are still designed around punchcard-era assumptions. He makes the case for live, interactive programming environments, drawing on Lisp, Smalltalk and REPL-driven development.

Douglas Adams gives a talk at UCSB, recorded shortly before his death, about the odd lives of animals and what they suggest about humanity's future. It draws on his Last Chance to See work and is funny and wide-ranging.

Mycologist Paul Stamets presents six ways mycelium and fungi could help save the world, in an 18-minute TED talk. Topics include environmental cleanup and other applications of fungi.

In this TEDxBerlin talk, environmental activist Michael Shellenberger explains why he changed from opposing nuclear power to advocating it, after looking at the evidence on Chernobyl, Fukushima and air pollution.

Johnny Lee demonstrates head tracking with a Wii remote and a head-mounted pair of IR LEDs, so a screen acts like a window into a 3D scene as your head moves.

A short demo of Code Bubbles, an IDE interface built around editable code fragments in bubbles instead of files. It was a research prototype for Java development.

Chris Granger presents Eve, a programming environment designed to be approachable for humans, at Strange Loop 2015. The talk covers the project's approach and design ideas.

Engineering Explained compares the lifecycle emissions of keeping an old car with those of buying a new, more efficient one. It weighs manufacturing emissions against emissions from driving, and covers gas versus electric cars.

A FoundMyFitness episode on how microplastics and associated chemicals such as BPA and PFAS accumulate in the body, including the brain and reproductive systems. It also discusses ways to reduce exposure.

A Google I/O 2019 talk explaining the architecture of Linux on Chromebooks (Crostini), a sandboxed Linux development environment built on containers inside a VM, with demos and design rationale.

A 35-minute demonstration of NeXTSTEP Release 3 by Steve Jobs. It shows the object-oriented development environment and features such as dragging a live chart between apps.

Mitchell Hashimoto walks through his setup for running a NixOS virtual machine on a Mac as his development environment, with a config repo on GitHub.