this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2024
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If you think about productivity, you can't help but think that having the default state of your computer being an image with a few icons on it is less than stellar. For opening files, it will never be tidy enough to give you access to all you need, you need a launcher or a folder structure, meaning the desktop is bad at this. For opening apps, having visual shortcuts on the desktop is a duplicate of whatever panel or launcher you have.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 4 months ago (5 children)

Within the first minute just entirely rips off LTT.

I gave up when this “task based file” workflow thing came up.

create a “file” add some text. (notepad). Want to add an image? You can! Now its a formatted document (word, writer etc). Want to present it? You press present and now its .. a presentation? (powerpoint etc)

How the hell could this ever work? All of these apps (under the hood) would need to handle all these wildly different file formats whenever you suddenly want to change what you’re doing. It would require the OS to basically pass everything around instead, and all apps to be able to understand any potential file format that could ever exist, in case the “incoming” file change (notepad to word, txt to docx) is wildly different.

And what about files that have entirely unrelated tasks? I have a video saved through the “task based workflow above” which my final output is a playing video (so in vlc under the hood). But I don’t want to watch it, I want to edit it.

Am I now going to open the file and choose an app, or open an app and choose a file? How do I tell the computer what “task” I want, without telling it both the file and the app.

In this task based workflow it seems to imply there can only ever be one app under the hood. What if I present internally on teams and externally on zoom?

What if I want to edit a video and watch a different video? Or edit the video in one of many different editors, all of which “edit video” but do it different ways and have different uses?

A task based workflow as described would still need to start from either a file or an app. Its all well and good having a “new file” button which then magically takes me to whatever thing I need to modify that file, but as soon as more than one app exists to do similar tasks, this flow entirely breaks unless you start to add a list of tasks with slightly different names. And youre back to the original problem statement.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

Ah, OpenDoc. It was a good start, back in the 90s, and now is seen as an impossible pipedream. Ah well.

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