meandmy10

Okay, Ross, your quest for a UI holy grail or renaissance is a fools errand. In a lot of ways UI is just the language we made to communicate to computers and in the same way as people not wanting to learn a new language, even if that language would be a faster/cleaner way of communicating, People don't want to learn a new UI, heck, technically qwerty keyboards aren't even arranged in the most efficient way for typing and it's not like qwerty inc has a monopoly on keyboard sales either these keyboards do exist, it's just only power users care enough to actually take the time to learn and make use of the better layout. Anyway that's less of why you won't find what your looking for and more an explanation of why UI has seemingly stagnated, although that isn't really true either, languages are always changing after all, we do it all the time with acronyms, we type GUI instead of "graphical User interface" because typing/saying "graphical user interface" every time is a mouthful; Shortcuts, Macros, even things like touchpad gestures or pulling your window to the top of the screen to maximise it are the acronyms of UI, we all have our own dialects, but we share the same base language. I also think it's very important to point out one perfect UI solution for one person may be a nightmare for others, there is no "UI Kung fu" as you put it there are simply different favours of kung fu, some better for some things then others, sometimes working in the terminal is legitimately the most effective way of getting some things done, but for most things and people that isn't true, what you should be asking isn't what new UI should we be using, but how we can evolve/supplement current UI practices to allow most people to get what they want to do done without hindering everyone else too much. Now none of this is out to defence Windows 10 of course, I moved to a Linux distro earlier this year in part to get away from our corporate overlords at Microsoft, but most of Microsoft's decisions with windows 10 makes sense in the context of making it accessible and safe for the vast majority of people, that's just how it's going to be and most users are fine with that, you and I on the over hand, less so, but it's not like options don't exist the one a bunch of people have pointed to, and the one I personally use is KDE Plasma which I honestly can't recommend highly enough. I don't really think I can go back to how Win10 does things now either, I think you would be surprised with the amount of things you can edit with Plasma if you had another look at it, for example I just discovered you can actually edit what's on the titlebar (you can even remove the min/max/close buttons if you really wanted), point is KDE Plasma is the gold standard in desktop environment customisation and is probably the best modern solution you can find at the moment that gives you the control you want, heck, you can even install plugins to add functionality to most things. The only non starter for you with this solution is that you need to run it on linux, which has a few caveats: Games compatibility can be a pain, your mileage may vary depending on the games you want to play though, wine (windows comparability layer) has come a long way and proton (Valve's flavour of wine built for games) picks up the slack for games wine struggles with, It's surprising how many things just work out of the box these days and it's worth looking into. Lutris is worth looking into in aiding with this, particularly when it comes to older games. You might need to find some new software, I spent most of my time converting to linux looking for software to replace what I was using on Windows 10. Hardware support might be slow to come and for some things may never come at all Companies have a habit of not making drivers for linux because of how small the market share is so it often falls to the community to make the drivers themselves Sorry got a bit off topic there, but there is my essay offering to add to the pile of essays you've inspired @Ross Scott I will legitimately help you get going with Plasma if you wanted, as fair as I'm concerned your more likely then I to convert people to linux then I am, and I want the Linux market share to be as large as possible. you probably won't take me up on that but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ TLDR: Desktop UIs are like a language, we each how our own dialects, stop trying to reinvent the wheel and make a new language. There are no silver bullets here, UI is a product of the job it's trying to achieve and what's great for one job isn't for another. The best general UI for power users like us is a customisable one, KDE Plasma is the gold standard for this currently. Seriously KDE Plasma is great and you should get it right now