All that can be better done by polishing an existing desktop. KDE is my preference and just needs a bit of work. GNOME is popular as well and some effort would help. Doing their own thing just means duplicating 20 years of effort that those projects have done.
I love KDE to bits, but it always looks like it only needs a bit of work, 10. and then its developers put in a fuckton of impressive work, and they release the next Plasma with ginormous changelog of fixes, fixes, and fixes, and you start using it, and find that it would need a little bit of work… GOTO 10.
Lately, they do a lot of grunt work, I’ll give them that. However it looks like some use cases I have routinely seem to be either extremely uncommon among the devs, or they have learned in 25 years to simply evade whatever path is known to cause bugs and got a blind spot, or both.
My use case: a HiDPI muxed dual-GPU laptop with one or two also HiDPI monitors plugged in sometimes, but I try Wayland session once in a while to see if we’re there yet. This seems to konfuse KScreen enough that it sometimes treats 200% scale as if it was 400%.
No, because you don't control the base project. For example, GNOME had a recent article about removing borders for buttons. I personally find that decision terrible. If you don't want to follow that decision, you're basically going to have to maintain a fork.
> Doing their own thing just means duplicating 20 years of effort that those projects have done.
Not really, because part of that time is spent learning things, trying thigns, and part of that time may be unnecessary.
Or you could just learn and adapt as people always do and get used to having buttons with no borders, or the colors being slightly different, or whatever the issue is. I think it really is ridiculous how the userspace people will get into petty fights and fork things over such minor issues, it makes the whole community look bad and look like nobody is getting along. For whatever reason the kernel doesn't seem to have this problem, but then again, I guess only a handful of people will ever care if a new kernel API has typos in the header.
I am relatively tolerant of minor UI issues, but I think the kernel doesn't have this problem for reasons that will probably never translate to desktop environment development.
It is a much more difficult to maintain a different kernel than it is a different desktop environment. So there is a huge incentive to cooperate on one kernel, even among companies with wildly different concerns (e.g. embedded IoT devices vs. cloud servers).
The kernel is also developed with an entirely different support culture than, say, Gnome. Backward compatibility for all supported use cases is taken extremely seriously by kernel developers. If it works on today's Linux kernel you can be almost assured it will work in 5 or 10 years. So, kernel users (i.e. developers, distro maintainers, etc.) stay happy because their stuff doesn't break.
Contrast this with the more "opinionated" DEs and you see features yanked and changed at a comparably dizzying rate. So, DE users experience a rate of change and support dynamic that is actually much "worse" than kernel users do.
As someone who has been hacking on desktop stuff for a while, I totally disagree with your comment.
Maintaining a different desktop is a massive undertaking. The total amount of lines of code in GNOME or KDE is comparable to the lines of code in the kernel. It is no joke to make a new desktop environment, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. It's not just a matter of take GNOME and replace the window manager and then you're done. But I suspect that is what System76 will start with and then they'll see how much money they can raise from that. (Probably not much if Purism is any indication)
Backwards compatibility to the kernel only matters to the syscall API. There are areas of the kernel that get quite a lot of churn. Or things such as obsolete/unmaintained drivers and architectures getting removed. But nobody complains about those because it only matters to driver developers or other low-level people like the systemd maintainers. And when something broken does make it into mainline, the few people who get affected by those drivers who do complain get told "too bad, there is no money/time to fix it, buy new hardware or pay a support vendor" or something like that. You know, the usual thing you hear from any open source project. I really don't see how the support culture is much different. I know it's common for people to call out GNOME but I never understood any of the complaints there, you can still grab GTK1 and GTK2 and compile them if you really want to use those, as bad an idea as it may be. Those are about as unmaintained and crufty as any of the older areas in the kernel, and they're still technically around.
I don't really get it. I mean, I hear your frustration, but you're saying you would rather spend your life maintaining a fork? I hope you see how that's also a bad option... How can this be done so everybody wins?
No, what I'm saying is that I slowly transition to software that changes in a way I dislike less. I went from Windows to Ubuntu, from Ubuntu to Pop. I think that in a few years I will be one of those minimalist DE/WM users because those things change even less.
I used a minimalist WM for many years but stopped because I realized I was just being stubborn and resisting change for no reason. It ended up being more work to constantly keep trying to compensate for things that are missing in such a "minimalist" environment.
If you ask me, it pays to just learn to be flexible and learn to appreciate and work with the strengths of a software even if you don't like some aspects of it.
The bulk of my Linux experience has been with minimalist environments. These days, my attempts to use a desktop environment ends in frustration. Why? It is not as though there is anything wrong with the desktop environments. In fact, it's a bit refreshing to install a fresh system, tweak a few settings in the graphical settings managers, then get to work.
The reason for the minimalist approach simple enough, I am accustomed to to it. Experiences with desktop environments tend to start with the idyllic romantic honeymoon and end with the realization that, after the initial setup, I am not actually using it for anything aside from launching programs and managing windows. The bulk of my time is being spent in a handful of actual applications, so why would I want to put up with all of the additional clutter?
On the other hand, I have a friend that's been using minimalist systems more and more, we talk a lot and he seems to have no problems with productivity, and maintaining/compensating doesn't take him much time.
> If you ask me, it pays to just learn to be flexible and learn to appreciate and work with the strengths of a software even if you don't like some aspects of it.
I want to be flexible in my work, but not with my tools. Having to be flexible with my tools means that I can never reach a level of mastery. I would be building my skills on shaky ground.
My background is human machine interaction. The lack of button borders is a big step back. I can adapt to fads, but I don't see why I should be asked to adapt to a fad that is objectively worse for usability.
KDE wasn’t the first gui for Linux. Wasn’t writing that duplicating effort? If it wasn’t for people rewriting things because it didn’t suit them we wouldn’t have most of the modern software we have today.
Before KDE there wasn't any consistent toolkit to make consistent apps on. There are a lot of frameworks in KDE that get reused to do powerful things and make them work. X11 did some things like the middle button paste, but there are a lot of things missing and so nobody had it. KDE fixed those. (And GNOME too )
Its true on Linux. It wasn't used because it wasn't free software and you had to pay to use it, it was a default propietary UNIX GUI on commercial UNIX computers. You're assuming Motif+CDE has always been open source and used on Linux, it became free software too late, GNOME and KDE became better DE, were free, it wasn't as good as those alternatives by that time and nobody had any incentive to switch to CDE (desktop Linux didn’t even use it aside from a blip that RH did).
Motif was propietary software until 2012 and subject to royalty fees, the same could be said about OSS for linux audio, which they abandoned for ALSA since it wasn't proprietary (OSS went from free to proprietary so it was abandoned, by the time it was free again nobody wanted to use it), except nobody used CDE or motif on linux aside from RH for a short time because it wasn't free software.
