How the Desktop UX needs to evolve to keep up with Local First

The desktop UX has not significantly changed in almost 40 years! Sure, there have been lots of incremental additions and things have improved, but there is a “QWERTY keyboard” effect going on. Too many people think the desktop is good enough and it’s too much trouble to change.

Local-first can’t succeed just as a clever app. Just like the Macintosh unlocked consistency and functionality across multiple applications, we have to push for new ideas and user flows to unblock users. This talk suggests that doing so will significantly help how we build and interact with local-first applications. I’ll propose several ways we can do this.

This talk is an extension of my Ubuntu 25 talk last year: https://youtu.be/1fZTOjd_bOQ