What would your perfect OS UI look like?

[JayM]

4. Dragging sliders to change numeric setting values ... takes so long to be able to get the value to exactly what you want. In addition to or instead of the slider the value number should be able to be directly entered, or at least have up-down arrow buttons so you can get the value reasonably close with the slider then fine-tune it with the arrow buttons.

There is a way to easily adjust a slider in small increments. Make the slider active (click on it) and then use the arrow keys to adjust the setting in the finest increment possible. One arrow key-stroke equals one slider value change.

... I have already uninstalled one item simply because I could not get it to reopen with the same window placement and size. ...

Just FYI, installing gdevilspie which is a GUI version (MX-21 not available; MX-19 Test Repo) or devilspie2 which is not GUI (MX-21 and MX-19 both Stable Repo) will allow opening an application window at the size and location as determined by the user. I've been using both for years without any problems. Just want to show that a (easy) workaround to that shortcoming is known.

Thanks, but the point is that end-users shouldn't need to use undocumented keyboard tricks or add-on programs to overcome shortcomings in the GUI. Those shortcomings shouldn't even be there. There should already be mouse-clickable arrows in the settings GUI. The window manager should do its job and remember the size and position of the windows that it's supposed to be managing, the lazy slacker.

[CharlesV]

Thank you all for your thoughts and preferences, there is some GREAT stuff here!!

This all reinforces my belief that there are so many different views that I find it hard to believe we will ever find ‘the’ solution at all.

I want to shout out @Stuart_M that he pretty much nailed what I think too. MX-10 Xfce (with a few ‘major ‘ tweaks. )

And a HUGE yes @JayM ! Excellent list!

My personal list contains a lot of what many have said here, with a few things that I think “pie in the sky” would solve many wish lists.

#1 on my list is the OS’s ability to have programmers write to API to create windows, window frames, menus and all control items. But, the OS controls how it is created and seen, or even IF the user see’s it! Being able to have the user turn off or change what they want in nearly every area. You need larger buttons – done, remove or add buttons – done, touch or voice – done! But the common piece that ties it all is that every application running on the system has the way the user told the OS to present it.

#2 on my list was dolphin_oracle’s hot-keys and super-key to anything! (And I LOVE the desktop to folder concept!) Running an OS almost entirely by keystroke is a big one and pretty dang hard once you get a real feature set!

#3 was a way to “turn on touch screen only” features. While tweaking and add-ons can bring about 80% of this, I think in today’s environment the OS should be able to just ‘turn on touch’.

and rest of my list I believe everyone here covered!

What I find of real interest is that MOST of what people are saying here… MX has and yes while most DE solutions have varied visual and features, much of what we ask for is already here. And much of the UI that is tossed around covers most of the things.

[swarfendor437]

There are a couple of things that OS's should use as the baseline, that is Accessibility. Themes tend to be aimed at users who are (like me) fortunate to see a great theme, such as Candy, Sweet, or my preferred current global theme of Colorful-Dark-Global. Where KDE theming tends to fall over is Window Decorations. Everything is fine, until you open (from recent experience) say Firefox when the minimize, maximise and close icons shrink, but not with other Application windows. Further there are some nice dark themes that are transparent, so when you open say Firefox, the white background shines through the transparent menu and the white text of the menu becomes unreadable. Another element is cursors - default ones should have no shadows and should be scalable like the Oxygen ones up to 72 points/pixels. I still participate on my national VI Forum (Vision Impairment Forum - which should really be renamed Vision Support which was put forward for our service by one of its users) where it came to light recently that Windows 11 no longer has the option to change elements such as font sizes in Window Headers, Menus and so on. All that is available is magnification which is a retrograde step. Recently I have discovered that my eldest who has Lupus can now only cope with a dark background with white Comic Sans font. So I replaced LinuxFX-10 which was E.O.L. anyway with MX-Linux 23.1 KDE on a Dell Latitude E6500 which she really likes. I have argued in response to the Windows 11 issue that it in different terms, that it is not fit for purpose when it comes to accessibility. Plasma offers so much more, including font-scaling and more importantly, an easy to use GUI Font Management system. Why should someone be limited to their preferred font to just the Text Processor when you can have it present throughout the whole system which is what Plasma offers. One last issue that should be noted is that OS's like Antix and MX (and Devuan) have kept 32-bit versions alive and saving old kit from becoming E-waste! One more thing in respect of KDE, when changing to a different theme, items pinned to taskbar don't get lost when changing theme and having to pin them again (... and again, and again ...!)