Desktop UI cutting edge cycling

This caught my eye

Microsoft has polished up the animations
that give the OS a more comprehensive feel. When you open a new window,
it flies out on to the screen from the icon and when you minimize it,
it collapses back in to the icon on the taskbar. It is a slick animation
and if you have used OS X, it is similar to the one used to collapse
windows back in to the dock

Sooo not only has OSX had this for a bit I hear, Gnome 2 + compix had this for a while back in like what, 2008-2012 on the Ubuntu desktop. This + wobbly windows + multiple desktops as a cube gave IMHO some of the best physical desktop/windows feel/visual metaphors ever seen/“felt”

Then We tossed it all away on Unity and Gnome 3 and Windows went the weird 8 way, but now Windows is getting them for it’s first time as some new people realise their worth. I wonder if we’ll be getting them back in the linux desktop land soon.

And I despair a bit at the last cycle of desktop UX “wisdom” that seems to have thrown so much away and now be clawing it back slowly… :frowning:

A lot of modern Windows UI concepts are born out of copying other operating systems. Even drop shadows on the windows themselves was in Linux before Windows. Windows 8 Metro-but-not-called-metro-anymore UI was a copy of all the bad things of Android.

Windows 10 apparently brings multiple desktops, something that has been in Linux since forever and OS X has had it for quite a few years too.

It is very difficult to innovate in a useful way in the desktop space because the desktop has evolved into something very good. There are attempts at it that arguably fail (Windows 8 and in my opinion but no one else’s Unity). The successful ones appear to stick true to things that have been tried and tested for many years only slightly evolving ideas that have been around a long time.