Recently, I watched a fantastic talk by Scott Jenson at Ubuntu Summit 25.10 (yes, the future is already here) that completely took over my brain. The title is provocative: “Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever?”
If you work in development or design, you probably feel that over the last 20 years we’ve mostly been “sharpening the razor.” The desktop, fundamentally, hasn’t changed. And Jenson, with the background of someone who worked at Apple in the 80s, at Google, and at Frog Design, came to say the obvious thing nobody wants to admit: the era of copying Apple and Microsoft is over.
Watch the video here. It’s worth every minute:
The End of Copying
Scott’s central point is that Linux and Open Source spent decades “drafting” (that vacuum behind a race car) Apple and Windows. It was safe. If Apple did it, it was validated, so GNOME or KDE could adapt it.
But the problem is that they stopped innovating on the desktop.
- Apple tried to kill the Mac with the iPad (and failed at productivity).
- Microsoft is lost trying to stuff ads into the Start Menu and failed with Recall.
There’s no one left to copy. If we want the desktop to evolve, we are going to have to jump into the trash compactor (a great reference he makes to Princess Leia in Star Wars) and risk something new.
UX ≠ UI (And Why That Matters)
One part that really resonated with me was his criticism of the term “UX/UI.” Jenson says he hates that term “with the force of a thousand suns.” And he’s right.
When we lump the two together, we reduce UX to “making things look pretty” (pixels). But UX is architecture, flow, understanding the problem. He uses the concept of “Learning Loops” from game design.
Fun is just another word for learning. — Raph Koster
A good desktop teaches you how to use it through consistent loops. The example he gives about text editing on mobile is brutal: they tried to copy the desktop without understanding that a mouse “click” is fundamentally different from a screen “tap” (where scrolling has priority over clicking). The result? Editing text on a phone is still a nightmare.
Coloring Outside the Lines
What inspired me the most were the prototype ideas he suggested for the community:
- KDE Connect 2.0: What if mobile-desktop integration were perfect, focused on Android (which is more open), and didn’t try to be everything to everyone?
- Super Windowing System: Not just another window manager, but a system that understands data flow, history, and the clipboard as a single thing.
- Local AI: Not the corporate madness of giant LLMs, but Small Language Models running locally, ethically, to help with your personal context.
Conclusion
The talk is a call to action. We need fewer “gatekeepers” saying “users hate change” and more experimentation.
He cites the Ink & Switch model: small teams, three months of intense coding, one month writing a paper about what they learned. Open code, open learning.
I came out of this video wanting to prototype stupid things that might fail, but at least try something new. The desktop is an incredible productivity tool that we’re neglecting because we think it’s “already done.” It’s not.