There isn’t really a lot of alternatives to the "desktop", since it basically just means arranging stuff within a rectangle, and what else would you do on a rectangular screen? The only alternatives are having everything fullscreen, like TUIs, or else tiling windows, so that you never see the actual desktop. Similar for folders. You need a way to visually represent groupings of stuff, and there isn’t a lot of choice besides lists/menus or a two-dimensional layout of proxy items (usually labelled icons).

I think we already found out what works best for monitor+mouse+keyboard 20-ish years ago. There's a lot to improve in terms of consistency and various details, but I don’t think there's any new paradigm to be found that would work better.

> Even in this article just a few sentences after stating we should start from first principles he then jumps into the assumption of the "desktop".

Agree. Although I can see how the idea of "first principles" can be a very difficult starting point. A blank sheet of paper is a scary monster.

There's a huge breadth and depth of non-"desktop" GUIs out there, some (like smartphones) are even wildly successful. It's good to explore them for inspiration. Some of my favourites:

- Arcan (https://arcan-fe.com/about/) - I won't attempt to summarize, just dive in!

- SailfishOS (https://sailfishos.org/) - mobile UI focused on interaction through gestures / swipes; I've used it as my daily driver for a couple years.

- Speaking of mobiles, classic Nokia UIs allowed you to navigate to a specific item in the menu by pressing the corresponding digit on the dial pad. Once you learned where a particular item is, accessing e.g. your SMS inbox was extremely quick.

- Apple Watch / WatchOS (https://www.apple.com/watchos/) - I've always loved the idea of a device where one of the primary interaction methods was a wheel/dial of some sort. The watch even gives you context-sensitive tactile feedback.

- ZUIs in general (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_user_interface) and the work of Jef Raskin in particular: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy_(software) - this is the guy who helped design the Macintosh, but his other work took a radically different route.

- Magit (https://magit.vc/). Many common git operations are reduced to a couple of keystrokes; the obscure features are more discoverable, and the cumbersome procedures (such as rebasing, or staging individual hunks) become simple and intuitive. Also check out transient (https://github.com/magit/transient), which is the "UI toolkit" that powers Magit.

> non-"desktop" GUIs out there, some (like smartphones) are even wildly successful.

Smartphone UIs are non-desktop metaphors? They sure seem like a desktop metaphor to me, albeit a very tiny desktop.

A physical desktop is somewhere you lay out objects and organize work, and desktop GUIs have metaphors for that (windows, icons). A phone is more like a pocket notebook, a camera, a map/compass, etc. You can take it out of your pocket on the subway, in a park, on a date, or during a hike; you turn pages to find the information you need, point and shoot a photo, figure out where you are, write down a phone number, etc. There's very little in common with how you'd use a physical desktop, and early smartphones (pre-2007) that tried too hard to be like a desktop really, really sucked.

so agree that a lot is not going back, perhaps more just modifying whats there.

i think the first rule for me is: computers need to make things more simple for humans.

how we control our devices, how we use those controls to do things (like interact with these guis), currentlt the model makes things always difficult and practically ensures people lose immersion of their real life into some device screen and controlscheme.

tldr i guess; u can optimise guis etc. but if you dont change the interface to those guis its not reinventing anything. these things work in concert to generate the users experience.