desktop switching

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

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

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.

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.

PewDiePie describes switching to Linux and encourages viewers to do the same. It is a casual, enthusiastic video aimed at a mainstream audience.

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 very short demo of SmackBook, a hack that used the MacBook Pro's sudden motion sensor so that smacking the sides of the laptop switches desktop spaces.

Matt Parker of Stand-up Maths examines scatter plots that were claimed to show fraudulent vote-switching in Michigan's 2020 election. He recreates the analysis and shows that the pattern arises from comparing percentages across different bases, not from fraud.

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 1984 AT&T film showing the live cutover of a Glendale, California central office from step-by-step switching to an electronic switching system. Installers prepare the site and then cut cables in a coordinated operation.

A 1951 Bell System training film showing how telephone calls are routed through a step-by-step (Strowger) switching office.

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.

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.

Bang! is an Atari 2600 demo by XAYAX that won first place at the Revision 2014 oldschool demo competition. It fits into a 32k ROM using F8SC bankswitching.

A short live demo of Dental Wings' Virtuo Vivo intraoral scanner at IDS 2019. It shows a fast color scan with a small, lightweight handpiece.

A short demo of a 3D Wayland compositor built with Qt 5 and QtWayland, mapping input to and compositing the output of Wayland applications in a 3D scene, also running on a Raspberry Pi.

First of a three-part tutorial series on the i3 tiling window manager for Linux. It explains what i3 is, how to install it on Ubuntu, and how to use it.

The official demo video from Be, Inc. showing BeOS running multiple videos, media applications and a responsive desktop on 1990s hardware.

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.

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.

Alex Russell's Chrome Dev Summit 2016 talk on building web experiences that work on slow, flaky networks and low-power devices. It argues developers should focus on the performance of real-world mobile hardware rather than desktop machines.

A PBS Space Time episode explaining how space and time swap roles inside a black hole's event horizon. It is part of the channel's black hole series.

David Beazley's PyCon 2010 talk explains how the Python Global Interpreter Lock works and shows experiments where multithreaded code runs slower, even on more cores, due to lock contention and context-switching overhead.

An animated, profane rant critiquing Windows 8, especially its touch-first interface on desktop PCs. The author draws on a background in tech journalism to lay out the UX problems.

Linus Torvalds is interviewed at Aalto University in 2012, followed by an audience Q&A. He talks about Linux, kernel development and the desktop, and about Nvidia support. The Q&A has a well-known moment where he is blunt about Nvidia.

A demonstration of SymbOS, a multitasking operating system for 8-bit Z80 machines, running on a real MSX turboR with an MP3MSX card and a CF IDE interface. It shows the OS playing audio and running a graphical desktop on very old hardware, captured from the real machine and not an emulator.

A live-coded demo by Jonathan Blow showing how to get object-system-style expressiveness in a data-oriented way, covering structure-of-arrays layouts and composition. It shows features of his Jai language that make programs fast.

Linus Tech Tips builds a Linux PC together with Linus Torvalds, who talks through parts selection, kernel development and some of his side projects. The conversation also touches on AI in kernel work.

A demonstration of the 1982 Xerox Star user interface, including its desktop, icons, documents, networking and printing. The uploader argues that Apple's later Lisa and Mac interfaces evolved from these ideas rather than copying them.

Ted Nelson, in his Computers for Cynics series, gives a critical history of Xerox PARC's vision of personal computing. He lists what he sees as the limitations and wrong turns in PARC's approach to the desktop and documents.

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.

Linus Tech Tips' rant on Intel's X299 platform and Core i9 launch, criticizing how Intel segments the market by limiting PCIe lanes and charging for features like VROC keys.

Totally Gridbag is a short humorous animation about the frustrations of Java Swing's GridBagLayout, originally made as a Flash cartoon.

A one-minute clip of Steve Jobs describing how he cut Apple's product line down to a four-quadrant matrix of consumer and pro, desktop and portable, during the 1997 turnaround.

A Computer History Museum recording of the final demonstration of the Xerox Star, the early graphical user interface workstation. It is a long demo session that shows the design thinking behind desktop, icons and windows.