Scott Jenson, who has worked on user‑interface and user‑experience design at Apple, Google and other companies, spoke at the Akademy 2026 conference hosted by KDE. According to the talk, he said his long career in UX began at Google in 2005, when the company was not yet focused on profit over principle, and that he later left Google to try to atone for his time there by contributing to projects such as Mastodon and Home Assistant. He noted that his earlier talk at Ubuntu’s conference the previous year had attracted more than half a million views on YouTube, indicating strong interest in desktop UX topics. Jenson argued that desktop user experience differs from other kinds of UX, citing two concrete examples from his work on macOS. First, while developing the Finder’s file‑name display, he suggested placing ellipsis characters in the middle of long names rather than at the end to preserve more information—a detail that later became a noted macOS trait. Second, he described how the Mac handles mouse‑down and mouse‑up actions during drag‑and‑drop: selection occurs on mouse down, but the window only rises on mouse up, allowing a user to drag a file from a background window without bringing it forward. On most Linux systems, the window rises as soon as the mouse button is pressed, which complicates dragging files between windows. Jenson said he had raised this issue on Mastodon two years before Akademy 2026, and a KDE developer responded by implementing the change within hours. He portrayed that rapid response as an illustration of how open source can work when someone says “that’s a good idea, I’ll just do it” and then ships the feature. Jenson contended that the desktop UI has not changed significantly in about twenty years, having stabilized after the flurry of innovation in the 1980s and 1990s. He observed that much of the Linux desktop’s look and feel was originally copied from Windows and macOS, with KDE even stating its goal is to be similar to Windows for users. While acknowledging that projects such as GNOME have performed user research and that KDE’s human‑interface guidelines are based on contributor studies, he argued that these efforts remain exceptions rather than the norm, and that the broader Linux community has historically leaned on Apple and Microsoft to conduct UX research and absorb the associated mistakes. He suggested that it is sensible to let those companies pioneer new ideas so the open‑source world can “draft behind them,” but criticized both firms for having largely abandoned desktop innovation. According to Jenson, Apple has let its desktop hardware and software languish while chasing the iPhone and iPad, even expressing a desire for the Mac to disappear—a wish that did not materialize. Although Apple has recently returned attention to the Mac, he said its recent additions, such as the Liquid Glass design language, are mainly intended to tighten integration with the iPhone ecosystem rather than improve the desktop experience. He characterized Microsoft’s recent desktop moves as a series of missteps, including pushing OneDrive storage, the privacy‑controversial Windows Recall feature, and pervasive advertising. Facing three common pushbacks—first that mobile has won and the desktop should simply copy mobile approaches, second that the WIMP model is exhausted, and third that the community should continue patching rather than leading—Jenson rejected the first two, arguing that mobile dominance does not extend to productivity tasks where desktops still excel, and that there remains ample room to experiment beyond the traditional windows, icons, menus, pointer paradigm. He urged open‑source developers to take leadership in desktop innovation rather than waiting for others to take risks.
