Idly browsing
I tend to give GNUStep a try now and then -- not because I'm not quite happy with KDE (although I seem to remember that alt-up moved to the parent directory in our file dialog before 3.5, or am I mistaken?) -- but because I've always wanted a NextStep machine and never could afford one. It's kind of misplaced, but there you are. And GNUStep is coming along quite nicely, not so much of the "we are not a desktop environment, we are a cross-platform development environment that allows you to create apps that only work together well in their own desktop environment that you're not gonna get" anymore, but it's nowhere near polished or even usable yet.
But that's not important: what is important is Riccardo's blog, the Art is Long. Because the GNUStep guys aren't constantly pushed to make something that's more like Windows, more like OS X (okay, there's some of that, but not too much, I feel), more like Gnome or more like KDE, they have some leasure time to look around.
So, and that's the point: Riccardo pointed me at a lecture by Alan Kay [ part 1 ] part 2 ] that was pretty mind boggling. From Doug Engelbart who had a cooperative office suite where two people, each with their own mouse pointer ("bug" he called them) are working on the same document, miles apart, with a live video link in a corner of the screen, to eleven year old kids who write a ham radio circuit design app, to the slightly tubby woman who learns to play tennis in twenty minutes.
And all along really good advise about designing software and computers for users.