General Design Principles

General Design Principles

People tend to love designs that are highly coupled and highly cohesive.

This means, for example, when considering a desktop graphical environment, they prefer something that does the entire thing: That is, has a panel, tray icons, quick settings, application launcher, dock, workspace switcher, colour themes, animations and system software that matches the design. Additionally, notification and event handlers.

While a desktop environment by itself is a highly cohesive entity, the subcomponents may be highly coupled, making the whole desktop environment a big bundle which cannot be broken down. This is bad from a developer perspective, but is perfectly normal for a user.

Now, when it comes to window managers in the nerd space, they prefer a barebones window manager, which is often separate even from the compositing manager, and to add in all the functionality they desire themselves. This, while allows flexibility, can be daunting to a new user.

The choices a nerdy user has to make

One has to choose:

- The type of window manager (Manual Stacking, Manual Tiling, Dynamic Tiling)
- The choice of displaying protocol (X or Wayland)
- The choice of window manager (Based on what features it has and any plugin ecosystem)
- The choice of panel and dock
- The choice of panel widgets (Workspace Switcher, Notifications, Calendar, Now Playing)
- The choice of tray widgets (App tray, Quick Settings, Battery, Power, Lock)
- The choice of any additional widgets (Weather, Container Handler, System Status, Some other cool idea)
- The choice of application launcher
- The choice of visual compositing manager (If it isn't already part of the window manager)
- The choice of login greeter
- The choice of themes (colour schemes, sound schemes, font schemes, icon packs)
- The choice of default set of applications (What is expected to be there aside from what is installed casually)
- The choice of themes for default applications (To make them fit with the rest of the system)

Furthermore, users choosing distributions like Arch may also have to choose stuff like:
- The choice of audio manager
- The choice of network and radio manager
- The choice of daemons to use (such as logging, power handling, session and multi-user seat handling)
- The choice of any additional convenience libraries (GNOME userspace virtual FS, XDG Desktop Portal API, XDG User Directories)
- The choice of any proprietary drivers and codecs to use
- The choice of secure access control mechanism
- The choice of kernel

Even further, geeks who hop between distros will have to choose stuff like:
- The choice of init system
- The choice of shared library
- The choice of userspace utilities
- The choice of package management
- The choice of system specific utilities

Those who use source based distros will have even further the options to choose:
- The choice of kernel flags
- The choice of compilation flags

And finally, system administrators will have to make the decisions of:
- Creating and assigning groups (Based on access permissions)
- Managing containers (For deploying network services)
- Managing reproducible system configurations (To ensure uniformity and ease of work)
- Ensuring security standards and firewalls to every network interface
- Managing reverse proxy and DNS

A careful user will also want to make the decisions of:
- Managing the configurations
- Ensuring backups and rollback functionality

While one can clearly see that a careful choice with this will result in a very loosely coupled and highly cohesive system, it would require a great deal of initial effort and understanding what one really wants before setting up a configuration. This also could lead to one sticking to a certain philosophy and never really wanting to change from that. But that can also be said for many people who use preset desktop environments, and don't really adapt to any newer UI, unless the change is brought about really slowly. In fact, they are generally much less flexible than their nerdy counterparts, who usually do spend a lot of time working with several UIs before coming to a perfect choice.

Meanwhile, prepackaged desktop graphical environments get the user started with no effort, with a matching setup in place, which is designed to meet the expectations of a certain target audience. Outside of the nerd space, complete operating systems are sold for a price, and they come with additional software that fits with the system. Since they invest a lot into marketing, they are able to focus more on the design, which is in fact what captures a user, much more than functionality.