I was work­ing up to a blog post on Ubuntu’s new “Unity” inter­face a cou­ple of days ago, but repeat­edly stalled when it came to mak­ing a point. The only point I could come up with was essen­tially just “I don’t like this”, which isn’t the great­est of sub­jects for a blog post — to say noth­ing of the hun­dreds who have trod­den that ter­ri­tory before me.

It’s a fairly bold new direc­tion for Ubuntu’s UI, and the first time their default inter­face has really diverged from what the upstream GNOME project pro­vides. Now I don’t like it for a num­ber of rea­sons: it’s slow, it doesn’t pro­vide some basic func­tion­al­ity, other func­tion­al­ity is really well hid­den (Go on, re-order your icons. Try it.) and it’s got an “our way or noth­ing” approach to han­dling workspaces.

On one hand, as a soft­ware guy whose main spe­cial­i­sa­tion is user inter­face design, I under­stand the urge to try new UI par­a­digms as often as pos­si­ble, on the grounds that sooner or later you’ll dis­cover some­thing that really is bet­ter than what you cur­rently have. On the other hand, I qui­etly despair at how far off that “some­thing bet­ter” seems.

Take, for exam­ple, me. I’m a UX per­son, and a per­fec­tion­ist when it comes to inter­faces. I’m irri­tated by slightly-wrong fonts and icons a cou­ple of pix­els out of align­ment. I love new things, new ways of organ­is­ing and dis­play­ing data. I’m big on aug­mented real­ity. And my desk­top looks like this:

Now I think that’s aes­thet­i­cally pleas­ing, but in terms of func­tion­al­ity, it resem­bles noth­ing quite so much as:

The only notable excep­tion is GNOME-Do (think Launchy on Win­dows or Quick­sil­ver on OS X), which I use exclu­sively for launch­ing apps. The main menu, lower left, only gets used if I for­get the name of some­thing. Aside from that, I’m using my com­puter in exactly the same way I was 16 years ago.

The rea­son for that, as far as I can tell, is that it is the UI of least resis­tance. In six­teen years, prob­a­bly 99% of my computer-using time has involved an inter­face that’s very sim­i­lar to that one. Sure, there are cer­tainly bet­ter UIs out there. Maybe from an objec­tive point of view, Unity is one of them. But for more than half of my life, my brain has been slowly opti­mis­ing itself for the Win­dows 95 style interface.

To become the “next big thing” in desk­top UI, a new par­a­digm must not only be bet­ter than what came before, it must be so much bet­ter that our brains don’t mind los­ing half a lifetime’s worth of learning.

That’s a mile­stone I haven’t seen reached lately on the desk­top, and a fear we may not see it reached before “the desk­top” stops being a thing.