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Comment by SmellyGeekBoy | Hacker News Reader

Yes and no. It's a different mindset. In many cases Linux can run CLI software from the 1960s just fine but the desktop moves fast and breaks things often.

The legacy support in Windows is admirable but does bloat the OS and create security and performance issues, for example. I suppose one could always fire up a VM with a 10-year-old version of Ubuntu to run older software, but it is indeed a hassle.

The correct answer depends where your priorities lie.

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> Yes and no. It's a different mindset. In many cases Linux can run CLI software from the 1960s just fine but the desktop moves fast and breaks things often.

Serious question to all the GNU/Linux hackers: why can't we standardize the desktop on GNU/Linux similarly?

I'm ready. Will you pay for my work to achieve your goal?

The problem rather is that even if you do, many distributions will not obey "your" standard.

EDIT: So the problem is that it is not a problem of work to be done, but a problem of willingness to standardize.

Some are trying to, but there is a bazaar of interests. Microsoft has no competing interests, they just enforce it top to bottom.

Lennart Poetering is trying to standardize from the bottom up, correctly IMHO, there's some push back, but mostly inertia and lack of resources.

Not exactly desktop, but for GUI Linux has GTK and QT. GTK is by far the most common and I'd say the standard. Anyone who argues is a KDE fanboy ;)

Neither Qt nor GTK care about backward compatibility.

Qt sees far more industrial usage than GTK. It has a nice C++ API and the licensing situation has always been clear for companies. GTK was never really a success outside of the Linux open source desktop community.

Two people can agree on a window manager if one of them is dead.

> Two people can agree on a window manager if one of them is dead.

But why is there no similar fight concerning CLI software?

There absolutely is.

bash vs zsh vs tcsh vs csh

vim vs vi vs nano vs joe vs emacs

screen vs tmux

and thats before you even get to all the configuration tweaks a given user has made to each.

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