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Comment by tannhaeuser | Hacker News Reader

I think the Linux desktop works just fine. At times of shrinking desktop usage, the goal should be to preserve what great apps we have (Inkscape, Krita, GIMP, LO, FF, Thunderbird, and hundreds of others), rather than to come up with new grand unified package managers and GUI frameworks that only serve to put additional burden on actual developers of said F/OSS software. It's not that the alternatives are free of problems either. Have you recently used Windows 10? It's total spyware crap and only useful for gaming. What about Apple's laughably limited, and increasingly failing hardware? I think Ubuntu comes as close to a mainstream desktop Linux as it gets. And if you're concerned about becoming dependent on a single vendor, you can switch to Debian, or merge Ubuntu packages into Debian, or use Devuan, etc.

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> I think the Linux desktop works just fine.

Sure, if you ignore all the data to the contrary. Despite repeated assurances from the Linux Desktop community that it is "good enough" it still has almost no buy-in, even though it is free. Valve has taken on the herculean task of making Linux Desktop a viable platform for games, which have long been an excuse as to why there's so little adoption, and still there are very few takers. Microsoft has seemingly put a lot of effort into trying to kill the Windows Desktop, and still there is no traction.

Until the Linux Desktop community actually starts listening to what users and developers are saying about why they don't like the Linux Desktop, and start taking responsibility for its problems, it is unlikely it will ever be taken very seriously.

There is no such thing as a "Linux desktop community" that can listen or respond to user requests (nor are Apple or MS listening to what their users actually want). There are, or have been, individual developers interested in particular tasks to scratch their itch, developing for fun, under a grant or GSoC-like sponsorship, etc.

Wrt fragmentation: on Windows there's a confusing choice of multiple app frameworks with no clear roadmap as well, which is very frustrating to Windows developers: Win32/Winforms, WPF, UWP, etc. Most new desktop apps, even those by MS such as Skype Desktop and VS Code, are cross-platform and based on Electron.

Apple has recently ditched Open GL; what kind of message does that send to Mac OS app publishers regarding any long-time commitment to the Mac platform?

The situation on Linux has been like that for ages; it's not going to change unless you want to throw away all the apps there are (cf. https://xkcd.com/927/). And maybe Ubuntu's UI is a bit frugal and ugly compared to Mac OS, but it's working in a predictable and rational way, and no less unified than Windows. If you have an issue with it, you can change it the way you like, rather than expect others to do it for free.

Still with all those issues that you point out, we have more luck targeting Apple, Google and Microsoft platforms than the plethora of GNU/Linux desktops.

Specially if we expect the users to pay for desktop software.

Excuses don't change reality: very few people are buying what Linux Desktop is selling, even at a price of $0. You can rationalize that as a failure of reality if you want, I suppose.

Desktop is shrinking because less computers are being bought as a 10 year old computer is still quite usable.

However laptops and 2-1 convertibles are also desktops.

Windows 10 is still less evasive than those Android devices on our pockets.

Overall, all of them are fine desktop environments.

But the thing is, if you're making a large application, for Gnome for example, then you can't by default be confident that your application can work very well on other desktop environments like KDE or XFCE.

I think this is what the speaker have meant: Linux Desktops moves many responsibilities on to you (You need to test your app against for each desktop environment for example). And sometime, that many responsibilities can be troublesome (burden, to say the least).

"But the thing is, if you're making a large application, for Gnome for example, then you can't by default be confident that your application can work very well on other desktop environments like KDE or XFCE."

This just isn't true. There are literally 40 different graphical environments available that can run X applications. If your target desktop has the required libraries for your app to work OR you have packaged them with your app it will work regardless of users desktop.

The main underlying issue is that, aside from Linus, no one seems to believe that they are creating a product for which they should be responsible to users. Everything that is wrong is someone else's fault in some way, because the whole Rube Goldberg machine of Linux userspace is slapped together from disparate projects with no coherent design philosophy.

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