If your complaint is that you dislike clones of Windows and Mac, then the combination of tiling window manager, shell, tmux, and vim/emacs is usable and provides an experience that is completely different from those other operating systems. That didn't go away on Linux. There is also plan9port too.
No, the problem is that people keep reinventing the wheel over and over again, instead of picking one app and improving it so that their efforts are cumulative.
