Ideas on modernizing the open-source desktop
If you enjoy this article, please consider subscribing to LWN. By Joe BrockmeierSeptember 23, 2026 Akademy Scott Jenson has been working on user interfaces (UIs) and user experience (UX) for many years at Apple, Google, and other companies. Now, he's trying to convince open-source projects to experiment more and drive the desktop beyond the age-old "windows, icons, menus, pointer" (WIMP) model.
- ▪If you enjoy this article, please consider subscribing to LWN.
- ▪By Joe BrockmeierSeptember 23, 2026 Akademy Scott Jenson has been working on user interfaces (UIs) and user experience (UX) for many years at Apple, Google, and other companies.
- ▪Now, he's trying to convince open-source projects to experiment more and drive the desktop beyond the age-old "windows, icons, menus, pointer" (WIMP) model.
2 outlets in our directory ran this story, first to last over 13 hours. All of the coverage we found sits in one bucket: centre. That one-sidedness is itself worth noticing.
- ▪ [$] Ideas on modernizing the open-source desktop — LWN.net (Linux Weekly News)
Hacker News (Front Page) files mainly under programming. We currently carry 2,079 of its stories. Top-voted stories on Hacker News.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | LWN.net |
| Canonical URL | https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1095425/2d9f411252325784/ |
| Publication time | Thu, 24 Sep 2026 02:52:09 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-24T05:10:12.864Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-24T05:10:12.864Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | CgSStCB9xP7O · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Welcome to LWN.net The following subscription-only content has been made available to you by an LWN subscriber. Thousands of subscribers depend on LWN for the best news from the Linux and free software communities. If you enjoy this article, please consider subscribing to LWN. Thank you for visiting LWN.net! By Joe BrockmeierSeptember 23, 2026 Akademy Scott Jenson has been working on user interfaces (UIs) and user experience (UX) for many years at Apple, Google, and other companies. Now, he's trying to convince open-source projects to experiment more and drive the desktop beyond the age-old "windows, icons, menus, pointer" (WIMP) model.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at LWN.net.