Free GUI: "Desktop First"

 All Posts Tagged: Free GUI  

Being "desktop first" relates to a lot of things.

Free GUI is all about:

• filling in as many missing pieces of a desktop first system for technical end users
• placing the same level of emphasis on bridging usability to brand new users as well
• spanning the breadth of skill levels in:
• creating
• sharing
• achieving desired personal UX results

This idea is fundamentally about something more than a list of focus areas like good configs or more custom options. It is really about a perceived hole in device-based software usability that contrasts with:

• the contexts of security walling between traditional applications
• the long trend of moving all applications to cloud and remote web compatibility
• the long trend of moving software (technology generally) away from self maintenance

Free GUI is also about more than any of these things in that it is a massively missing category of UX on Linux that deals with a fluidity of motion and control across functions that you simply cannot get with traditional applications. This is both quite simple in its effect, but also very understated with respect to its absence. 

I personally really consider most of Free GUI's ideas to be more of an extraordinary oversight rather than a revolutionary GUI idea.

Niceties of CLI Usage

The command-line is more than just a textual UX method of interacting with a computer as some kind of stubborn nostalgic preference over prettyboy graphics.

The command-line is also about:

• The way you can access many small programs that interact with each other
• The liberty and flexibility of using many commands to access and manipulate details on the system
• The way these programs can communicate with each other through piping, redirects, and signalling across the system
• Scripts can be written casually or with more involved methods. They can be run in realtime, or saved in permanent executable script files. Either, way they are the same exact language.

The commandline has a particular kind of liberty, granularity, open-endedness, and mobility across the system.

Typical GUI

Typical GUI serves as a UX for masses of people who actually have no concern for the same technical considerations or liberties of the commandline.

Typical Linux GUI systems are modeled specifically after other systems that are used outside of a Linux context - not directly from a sense of values and use cases that already involve a series of capabilities and liberties of how to fully use a computer.

Typical GUI systems were not designed primarily for security. That's not to say that they are inherently insecure. It's just that their security has evolved around the use cases that were developed on these other-purpose systems.

Many aspects of traditional GUI applications are built primarily around old packaging media, or they are focused around funneling attention and access around a specific set of functions around a product or service that comes from one company, with one goal.

There's a set of negative tradeoffs you get with these characteristics.

Free GUI

Free GUI is not primarily for creating applications in the traditional sense of being company product and service access windows. Instead Free GUI is about covering the wide variety of use cases that fall outside of what typical GUI application UX is optimized around. It is for more-or-less similar types of uses around system mobility and liberty that the commandline has, and then hopefully with some added capabilities that a GUI can afford users.

There are products and services that have command-line UX, but these programs/applications are typically quite different in how they function, in that they can still be used with certain kinds of interactions and liberties of the commandline. Their commands can still be combined and parsed alongside other commands, unless maybe they are cli environments, which focus attention much like windows.

As such, Free GUI will very much tend to fill a niche that is quite different than normal applications that companies distribute, and which many existing open source applications specifically mimic.

• This is also why traditional applications will always have a different security paradigm
• This is why traditional applications will always exist alongside something like Free GUI
• And visa versa, traditional applications will never replace something like Free GUI

This is why the ideas of Free GUI are much like a missing evolutionary branch of Linux GUI as a whole, spanning the last 30 years.

Free GUI is tied to techniques that are about whatever can be created from the local system, to function across the local system. These techniques do not lend well to being used to enforce a single purpose of an application from outside the computer system like a traditional application does. This is more-or-less how the commandline works as well, which is to say that the ideas and security are not alien. 

Add to that the huge potential GUI has for optimizing and innovating new ways of managing these types of capabilities through assistive tools and features, and you have an incredible new niche of possibilities, with a new set of positive tradeoffs.

Free GUI is about freedom of motion and liberation outside of how some statistical likelihood of how your attention should be focused, or the application's UX should be focused, or one group of people's efforts to funnel attention to a particular purpose. And instead of a GUI just corresponding to one pre-defined program or application, it can be any cluster of commands set out by a user to accomplish any set of tasks they deem to belong together.

The ability to speedily create custom graphical widgets, and combine them with scripts and data formatting greatly enhances what can be offered by such a system.