This is a really enjoyable take, pushing the feeling of what one does on a computer towards actually being at a desk and having to reach for various functions. I feel like that would enable spatial memory to do some cool things.
I miss the 90s chunkiness of switches, buttons, hardware: being able to hear the computer "think" (HDD seeks), the hum of a CRT. Modern machinery feels so insubstantial, emphasizing clean glass and tidy machined chassis. (chassies?)
I have this persistent daydream about a computer setup that feels like the Nostromo flight deck from Alien. I almost want to feel like I'm sitting _inside_ a computer when I'm at my desk, surrounded by powerful feeling electronics with substantial switches and such. Of course there's plenty of inconvenience there too, but something about it appeals to me.
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bmurphy1976
I want more stuff like this. The era 20 years ago (e.g. Enlightenment) was way more fun than the bland monotonic design we have these days. If you like bland modern design, great, that should be an option as well, but we should still have good variety.
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andai
This warms my heart.
I was just thinking about this the other week, when I bought an old iPhone, from the skeumorphic era, for nostalgic purposes. I've wanted one for years -- I only had the newer ones that were flat.
I always thought, nah, I'm just seeing thru rose tinted glasses, surely it wasn't that cool, I'm gonna be disappointed...
Well, I finally got one, and oh boy. It's even better than I imagined. There's just so much love and care put into the designs. We really lost something special.
(p.s. if you get a really old iPhone, don't reset the device. It's impossible to activate them now, found out the hard way.)
show comments
seemaze
Man, first Felix Reiseberg[0], then OpenCode 2.0[1], and now this in the last 24 hrs. Really giving off heavy Myst vibes. They are briefly interesting encounters, buy I deeply hope this isn't a legitimate UI trend.
It's hardly even skeuomorphism, it's a almost digital twin rendered with Phong.
The main difficulty I see in these "RETVRN TO SOVL" things is not the window-manager or desktop itself but the UI toolkits for the applications. GTK2 had so many excellent themes. Now GTK or libadwaita seem designed to resist themes and introduce constant breaking of selectors or widgets or whatnot. I believe they griefed the themers into just giving up. I have less knowledge about Qt, but I assume it's probably the better pick these days.
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uolmir
This is very funny. But I think it would make me feel like I was working inside of Papers Please or some similar game.
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tavavex
I'm typically not a big proponent of skeuomorphism, but it's nice to have actual variety of experimental options, a bit like the crazy things people did with UIs back in the old days.
lpghatguy
The README being so full of AI prose is super grating.
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Retr0id
> the kind iOS 6 had
> The room is ray-traced
imho, part of the charm of iOS6 was that everything was baked into native-resolution textures.
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tombert
I stand by that OS X Maverick was the most beautiful of all the macOS releases.
Actually that OS in general is what convinced me to buy a mac in like 2014; it felt like nearly every criticism I had with macOS at the time had been addressed. I miss those days.
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bovermyer
I love this. Hopefully we start to see more experiments like this.
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wlonkly
This reminds me of the Commodore 64 productivity software (on cartridge), Magic Desk:
This is lovely. I really hope society returns to chasing beauty again. We need it.
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inatreecrown2
What a lovely project, going to try it later on a spare x230.
I love to see a new floating window manager style, tiling is nice but floating too.
PanicAdmin
I see that this very bad idea is returning from the 90's.
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treetalker
> DEsk is Desktop Environment and desk in one word
They dropped the ball:
DESk would have been Desktop Environment, desk, and Skeumorphic in one word.
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yldreader
The entire concept of skeuomorphism on computers is nonsensical. A monitor has a default blank grey or black appearance. EVERYTHING else is skeuomorphic, including the ugly 'modern' color rectangles the people who use this word want to exempt.
ragazzina
> Windows are sheets of paper on a walnut desk.
The calculator is a sheet of paper..
elxr
Love skeuomorphism. This just gave me a reminder to build a paper-like calendar app now, with pencil markings showing events.
I definitely don't want a skeuomorphic desktop, but little web-apps, text editors, chat apps? I say we need a lot more of this type of design there, especially with how good modern CSS is at this kind of thing.
iamnothere
This is neat, it’s not for me (I prefer extreme minimalism) but I could see how some would prefer it. I like how we’re getting more desktop options now thanks to wlroots.
nntwozz
Flashback to TabWorks.
Compaq Presario 486 1994, I was 10.
And yes, played Myst on it.
Tempus fugit…
show comments
inamberclad
Sorry, that doesn't look like a walnut desk. That looks like stained pine wood.
BigGreenJorts
Love this so much. I've been thinking of trying to represent my notes in a way like this where categories of material are "stored together" not in folders, but "physical" items that represent the category like a globe for travel notes or a bookshelves of movie reviews etc.
chrisguilbeau
I always think about video game UI's when I read the skeuomorphic design arugments. I suspect video games use them, at the very least, because they are delightful and fun; which, in my opinion, is a good reason to do something anywhere.
I will say that a long time ago I installed enlightenment and after about 10 minutes the burning windows felt like they were getting in the way, so I guess, like everything, there should be balance.
RugnirViking
the "paper windows" idea doesn't seem to have been done with as much soul as the rest of the ui. Just a turned up corner. I reckon something done there could really tie this together
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lnvdpwl
Reminds me of the launcher I build in HyperCard when I was like 10 y/o. It consisted of some graphic of a desk an I could click different objects to run applications.
Fantastic. Giving me memories of MS Bob. Put a talking animal assistant in the corner and you’ve got it. Oh, and you could connect the assistant to an LLM of course.
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itomato
I'd be into something as useful as Quartz Composer was for Desktop Widgets, but not a full skeuomorphic desktop.
Indigo Magic or CDE is as close as I'd want to go with that concept.
2004 was a long time ago, and I suppose what is old can be new (again).
This will be the chance of the Linux desktop to thrive.
In the past ui development was so hard and none of the app developers had the expertise or appetite to do it properly.
LLMs changed that overnight. A good engineer can build great UI for their app.
HoldOnAMinute
UI design peaked with Motif Window Manager and has gone downhill ever since.
nirav72
I thought we were done with the skeuomorphism craze back in the late 00s. (Thanks Apple). Is the trend coming back?
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OroPla
This looks like something that heavily relies on a pointer device and thus is the opposite of what I want. But it can probably work well for people not minding this detail. Might even work better in VR.
anajimi
Amazing and beautiful, I love it! I'm working on something similar so it gives me ideas.
ilaksh
I think AR/XR glasses are going to start to become popular in the next couple of years and I think some mixed reality shells will have more physical/3d interfaces.
rootedbox
Do you want your desktop to feel like a 90s adventure mystery game by Sierra.. Well boy do I have the desktop for you!
luqtas
HN crowd be like: THANKS GOD APPLE WILL NEVER OPEN-SOURCE THE DE SO WE CAN'T HAVE THEMES FOR INDIVIDUALS WHO WANTS THEM
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V__
I can imagine this being really helpful for beginners and kids. It's hard to grok what windows and tabs are etc. without any context.
hliyan
This adds to a belief that I have that UI design undergoes cycles like fashion, just that we haven't yet seen a complete cycle.
ianeff
Wrong abstraction! I love it… But wrong abstraction!
lelanthran
This is pretty cool! I'd use this, once out of beta.
(Bonus points for not throwing AI-tells at everyone in the README - much appreciated).
hotelsacher
That control panel looks fantastic! Too bad I don't wayland. Last I checked, Mathematica doesn't like it.
TomJansen
Fun, makes me think of Bumptop :)
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esperent
I love this, at least from the screenshots. I'll test it out tomorrow. I hope this kind of design makes a comeback.
mcv
This looks like peak skeuomorphism. I like it, but ray-tracing the desktop sounds like overkill.
pmarreck
Now where's the Metro-inspired one?
jacknews
How come the 'documents' are floating above the wood surface creating such deep drop shadows?
kerm1t_
nice! would be cool to customize to different era's of office life ... or even a creative version, e.g. Picasso's desktop
Arubis
I can feel my shoulders unlocking looking at the screenshots.
MattCruikshank
Looks like an 80s video game.
nxobject
Welcome back, Microsoft Bob!
hackeraccount
That's a no for me - it seems like it would be a bear to use for more then 5 minutes.
I'm not sure if I feel the same way about skeuomorphism as a general design philosophy. Maybe this is just the wrong metaphor?
shaolinspirit
fascinating, I recently was also exploring various skeuomorphic design pattern in Flutter and now this!
Beijinger
memory 4 GB (DEsk itself 200-450 MB)
This makes it interesting. I may try it out. Moksha uses 200 MB to 300 MB of RAM
xbar
Love it. Maximize skeuomorphic design.
einpoklum
I am skeptical that a transition from X to Wayland is actually merited.
suggests it is LLM-generated. Not sure what to make of it.
mrsssnake
Skeuomorphic design was a solution to teaching the customer how to use the digital product, but I wish we have more of its side effects like shadows, icons that pop and other things that are pleasant for the eye and depth.
I don't know if it's just because it was better or am I just tired of the current white (like #FFFFFF white) backgrounds with everything flat and not connected. I would like my browser tabs to be in the shape of a physical tab in notebooks.
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wang_li
Skeuomorphism should make my life easier. But sometimes it goes against that. I want to have a button that prints my document, I don't want to have to operate a virtual letter press. Having a switch to turn something on and off that looks like a switch helps me. A screen door that is the lock activation isn't what I would expect.
jhoechtl
BeOS of 2026?
ortusdux
Please tell me it has coffee ring stains and spiral lined notebooks.
tamimio
Coupled with steam frame headset this might be great experience.
kogasa240p
Very interesting concept but I doubt it's stable due to the amount of slopped code and I don't like that it requires a hodgepoge of libraries from different DEs.
DonHopkins
In Brett Victor's 2011 essay, "A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design", he laid out the foundation for his critique of skeuomorphic design. He believes hands are our future.
On the visual pretense: "Pictures Under Glass sacrifice all the tactile richness of working with our hands, offering instead a hokey visual facade."
On touchscreens mimicking real objects without haptics: "Pictures Under Glass is an interaction paradigm of permanent numbness. It's a Novocaine drip to the wrist. It denies our hands what they do best."
On why this design path is short-sighted: "To me, claiming that Pictures Under Glass is the future of interaction is like claiming that black-and-white is the future of photography. It's obviously a transitional technology. And the sooner we transition, the better."
ranger_danger
Yes! Please bring back the soul we had with retro OS GUIs (and the speed)... it's time for a resurgence. Especially with new systems/RAM/GPUs/etc. not being a thing for quite a while for a lot of people now.
tillmannhgl
Sweet
mrsssnake
The thing I hate with vibed apps the most is zero seconds spend on how things around what is being build are already structured and what problems was already solved, just focusing on shiny result.
`sudo sh scripts/install_debian.sh`, a 583 lines long script, basically now a whole software just to handle the installation of this project on one distribution, seriously?
If we vibecode already, just do the normal packaging.
KerrAvon
okay, now use this for a month and report back
I don't hate skeuomorphic design but come on man
diegolas
god please no
AbraKdabra
Please no, seriously, fuck skeumorphism. There's a reason everybody stopped using it.
show comments
flowerlad
This project highlights why designers hate skeuomorphism. Skeuomorphism looks tacky unless done very very well. Skeuomorphic design under Steve Jobs looked very good. This doesn't come close.
This is a really enjoyable take, pushing the feeling of what one does on a computer towards actually being at a desk and having to reach for various functions. I feel like that would enable spatial memory to do some cool things.
I miss the 90s chunkiness of switches, buttons, hardware: being able to hear the computer "think" (HDD seeks), the hum of a CRT. Modern machinery feels so insubstantial, emphasizing clean glass and tidy machined chassis. (chassies?)
I have this persistent daydream about a computer setup that feels like the Nostromo flight deck from Alien. I almost want to feel like I'm sitting _inside_ a computer when I'm at my desk, surrounded by powerful feeling electronics with substantial switches and such. Of course there's plenty of inconvenience there too, but something about it appeals to me.
I want more stuff like this. The era 20 years ago (e.g. Enlightenment) was way more fun than the bland monotonic design we have these days. If you like bland modern design, great, that should be an option as well, but we should still have good variety.
This warms my heart.
I was just thinking about this the other week, when I bought an old iPhone, from the skeumorphic era, for nostalgic purposes. I've wanted one for years -- I only had the newer ones that were flat.
I always thought, nah, I'm just seeing thru rose tinted glasses, surely it wasn't that cool, I'm gonna be disappointed...
Well, I finally got one, and oh boy. It's even better than I imagined. There's just so much love and care put into the designs. We really lost something special.
(p.s. if you get a really old iPhone, don't reset the device. It's impossible to activate them now, found out the hard way.)
Man, first Felix Reiseberg[0], then OpenCode 2.0[1], and now this in the last 24 hrs. Really giving off heavy Myst vibes. They are briefly interesting encounters, buy I deeply hope this isn't a legitimate UI trend.
It's hardly even skeuomorphism, it's a almost digital twin rendered with Phong.
[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50082470
[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50094994
The main difficulty I see in these "RETVRN TO SOVL" things is not the window-manager or desktop itself but the UI toolkits for the applications. GTK2 had so many excellent themes. Now GTK or libadwaita seem designed to resist themes and introduce constant breaking of selectors or widgets or whatnot. I believe they griefed the themers into just giving up. I have less knowledge about Qt, but I assume it's probably the better pick these days.
This is very funny. But I think it would make me feel like I was working inside of Papers Please or some similar game.
I'm typically not a big proponent of skeuomorphism, but it's nice to have actual variety of experimental options, a bit like the crazy things people did with UIs back in the old days.
The README being so full of AI prose is super grating.
> the kind iOS 6 had
> The room is ray-traced
imho, part of the charm of iOS6 was that everything was baked into native-resolution textures.
I stand by that OS X Maverick was the most beautiful of all the macOS releases.
Actually that OS in general is what convinced me to buy a mac in like 2014; it felt like nearly every criticism I had with macOS at the time had been addressed. I miss those days.
I love this. Hopefully we start to see more experiments like this.
This reminds me of the Commodore 64 productivity software (on cartridge), Magic Desk:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Desk
This is lovely. I really hope society returns to chasing beauty again. We need it.
What a lovely project, going to try it later on a spare x230. I love to see a new floating window manager style, tiling is nice but floating too.
I see that this very bad idea is returning from the 90's.
> DEsk is Desktop Environment and desk in one word
They dropped the ball:
DESk would have been Desktop Environment, desk, and Skeumorphic in one word.
The entire concept of skeuomorphism on computers is nonsensical. A monitor has a default blank grey or black appearance. EVERYTHING else is skeuomorphic, including the ugly 'modern' color rectangles the people who use this word want to exempt.
> Windows are sheets of paper on a walnut desk.
The calculator is a sheet of paper..
Love skeuomorphism. This just gave me a reminder to build a paper-like calendar app now, with pencil markings showing events.
I definitely don't want a skeuomorphic desktop, but little web-apps, text editors, chat apps? I say we need a lot more of this type of design there, especially with how good modern CSS is at this kind of thing.
This is neat, it’s not for me (I prefer extreme minimalism) but I could see how some would prefer it. I like how we’re getting more desktop options now thanks to wlroots.
Flashback to TabWorks.
Compaq Presario 486 1994, I was 10.
And yes, played Myst on it.
Tempus fugit…
Sorry, that doesn't look like a walnut desk. That looks like stained pine wood.
Love this so much. I've been thinking of trying to represent my notes in a way like this where categories of material are "stored together" not in folders, but "physical" items that represent the category like a globe for travel notes or a bookshelves of movie reviews etc.
I always think about video game UI's when I read the skeuomorphic design arugments. I suspect video games use them, at the very least, because they are delightful and fun; which, in my opinion, is a good reason to do something anywhere.
I will say that a long time ago I installed enlightenment and after about 10 minutes the burning windows felt like they were getting in the way, so I guess, like everything, there should be balance.
the "paper windows" idea doesn't seem to have been done with as much soul as the rest of the ui. Just a turned up corner. I reckon something done there could really tie this together
Reminds me of the launcher I build in HyperCard when I was like 10 y/o. It consisted of some graphic of a desk an I could click different objects to run applications.
http://toastytech.com/guis/desk.html
Fantastic. Giving me memories of MS Bob. Put a talking animal assistant in the corner and you’ve got it. Oh, and you could connect the assistant to an LLM of course.
I'd be into something as useful as Quartz Composer was for Desktop Widgets, but not a full skeuomorphic desktop.
Indigo Magic or CDE is as close as I'd want to go with that concept.
2004 was a long time ago, and I suppose what is old can be new (again).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQQPTtdzBig
This will be the chance of the Linux desktop to thrive.
In the past ui development was so hard and none of the app developers had the expertise or appetite to do it properly.
LLMs changed that overnight. A good engineer can build great UI for their app.
UI design peaked with Motif Window Manager and has gone downhill ever since.
I thought we were done with the skeuomorphism craze back in the late 00s. (Thanks Apple). Is the trend coming back?
This looks like something that heavily relies on a pointer device and thus is the opposite of what I want. But it can probably work well for people not minding this detail. Might even work better in VR.
Amazing and beautiful, I love it! I'm working on something similar so it gives me ideas.
I think AR/XR glasses are going to start to become popular in the next couple of years and I think some mixed reality shells will have more physical/3d interfaces.
Do you want your desktop to feel like a 90s adventure mystery game by Sierra.. Well boy do I have the desktop for you!
HN crowd be like: THANKS GOD APPLE WILL NEVER OPEN-SOURCE THE DE SO WE CAN'T HAVE THEMES FOR INDIVIDUALS WHO WANTS THEM
I can imagine this being really helpful for beginners and kids. It's hard to grok what windows and tabs are etc. without any context.
This adds to a belief that I have that UI design undergoes cycles like fashion, just that we haven't yet seen a complete cycle.
Wrong abstraction! I love it… But wrong abstraction!
This is pretty cool! I'd use this, once out of beta.
(Bonus points for not throwing AI-tells at everyone in the README - much appreciated).
That control panel looks fantastic! Too bad I don't wayland. Last I checked, Mathematica doesn't like it.
Fun, makes me think of Bumptop :)
I love this, at least from the screenshots. I'll test it out tomorrow. I hope this kind of design makes a comeback.
This looks like peak skeuomorphism. I like it, but ray-tracing the desktop sounds like overkill.
Now where's the Metro-inspired one?
How come the 'documents' are floating above the wood surface creating such deep drop shadows?
nice! would be cool to customize to different era's of office life ... or even a creative version, e.g. Picasso's desktop
I can feel my shoulders unlocking looking at the screenshots.
Looks like an 80s video game.
Welcome back, Microsoft Bob!
That's a no for me - it seems like it would be a bear to use for more then 5 minutes.
I'm not sure if I feel the same way about skeuomorphism as a general design philosophy. Maybe this is just the wrong metaphor?
fascinating, I recently was also exploring various skeuomorphic design pattern in Flutter and now this!
memory 4 GB (DEsk itself 200-450 MB)
This makes it interesting. I may try it out. Moksha uses 200 MB to 300 MB of RAM
Love it. Maximize skeuomorphic design.
I am skeptical that a transition from X to Wayland is actually merited.
As for the post / the repo itself, this analysis:
https://www.salahadawi.com/hacker-news-ai-detector/50103338
suggests it is LLM-generated. Not sure what to make of it.
Skeuomorphic design was a solution to teaching the customer how to use the digital product, but I wish we have more of its side effects like shadows, icons that pop and other things that are pleasant for the eye and depth.
I don't know if it's just because it was better or am I just tired of the current white (like #FFFFFF white) backgrounds with everything flat and not connected. I would like my browser tabs to be in the shape of a physical tab in notebooks.
Skeuomorphism should make my life easier. But sometimes it goes against that. I want to have a button that prints my document, I don't want to have to operate a virtual letter press. Having a switch to turn something on and off that looks like a switch helps me. A screen door that is the lock activation isn't what I would expect.
BeOS of 2026?
Please tell me it has coffee ring stains and spiral lined notebooks.
Coupled with steam frame headset this might be great experience.
Very interesting concept but I doubt it's stable due to the amount of slopped code and I don't like that it requires a hodgepoge of libraries from different DEs.
In Brett Victor's 2011 essay, "A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design", he laid out the foundation for his critique of skeuomorphic design. He believes hands are our future.
https://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDes...
On the visual pretense: "Pictures Under Glass sacrifice all the tactile richness of working with our hands, offering instead a hokey visual facade."
On touchscreens mimicking real objects without haptics: "Pictures Under Glass is an interaction paradigm of permanent numbness. It's a Novocaine drip to the wrist. It denies our hands what they do best."
On why this design path is short-sighted: "To me, claiming that Pictures Under Glass is the future of interaction is like claiming that black-and-white is the future of photography. It's obviously a transitional technology. And the sooner we transition, the better."
Yes! Please bring back the soul we had with retro OS GUIs (and the speed)... it's time for a resurgence. Especially with new systems/RAM/GPUs/etc. not being a thing for quite a while for a lot of people now.
Sweet
The thing I hate with vibed apps the most is zero seconds spend on how things around what is being build are already structured and what problems was already solved, just focusing on shiny result.
`sudo sh scripts/install_debian.sh`, a 583 lines long script, basically now a whole software just to handle the installation of this project on one distribution, seriously? If we vibecode already, just do the normal packaging.
okay, now use this for a month and report back
I don't hate skeuomorphic design but come on man
god please no
Please no, seriously, fuck skeumorphism. There's a reason everybody stopped using it.
This project highlights why designers hate skeuomorphism. Skeuomorphism looks tacky unless done very very well. Skeuomorphic design under Steve Jobs looked very good. This doesn't come close.