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Comment by llcoolv | Hacker News Reader

I think that those "Let's make our own DE" dumb kids are both a symptom and a cause why Linux never broke on the mainstream workstation market.

Truth is that a shite miserable 25 year old xfce could be customised in a way good enough to compete with OS X. Why waste all the time on such a massive amount of extremely useless work? Just because it is fun?

And yeah, you can downvote this into oblivion, I don't care. The fact is that 80% of the comments on this thread are making fun of the very same retards for the very same reasons.

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>Truth is that a shite miserable 25 year old xfce could be customised in a way good enough to compete with OS X

In terms of appearance, maybe. Make that work consistently with most used programs with the same shortcuts, composition, behavior and rich integration between all these apps and then we're talking.

Getting everything working reliably, beautifully, integrated and fast demands many people thinking, designing, implementing, testing and fixing. It is very expensive and only affordable for companies that can make enough money with to return the investment. Linux has no presence on the desktop because vendors that make the most money with it have 0 presence on the desktop.

Additionally, out-of-the-box functionality matters a lot. DEs like XFCE have insane tweakability, but outside of a handful of settings most users don't take advantage of that. The majority of Windows and macOS users don't spend hours tweaking their setup to perfection, they just install Chrome and Spotify and maybe vertically orient their taskbar/dock if they're feeling spicy and it's off to the races.

And moving the needle on the out of the box usability front often requires changes that can't be made by changing the default configuration or becoming a contributor to an existing DE. The GNOME team would likely never approve of the changes seen just in the short blogpost, let alone anything more extensive.

>The GNOME team would likely never approve of the changes seen just in the short blogpost, let alone anything more extensive.

That's kinda the point of PopOS in the first place: retrofitting GNOME and Ubuntu with extra utilities for a better "out of the box" experience. Manjaro does basically the same thing on the Arch side of the fence, and both are essential to providing that experience you're describing. The GNOME team isn't intentionally holding back features or making intentionally bad choices here, they're just part of the brick in the wall. The GNOME desktop should be bland, so that the distro can provide a default and the end user can make changes where necessary. It's all part of one big machine.

Linux has no presence on the desktop market, yet apps like Steam and Spotify are ported to it, often with special considerations in mind. If we're talking about market share, you can have it: but in terms of software availability, everything is on Linux now. Wine is good enough to run any Windows app carte-blanche, and all of the most common apps (eg. Telegram, Discord, Zoom) have native clients.

Getting everything working reliably, beautifully, integrated and fast is not a matter of manpower, it's about the modularity of your system and the power the end-user has.

No matter how unpopular this approach is, I must agree... I've been on Pop OS for years, and it really is the best GNOME I've seen. However, GNOME itself is pretty weird and even slow these days – yet it's nearly the de facto Linux DE. And System76 is adding more bells and whistles, probably not making it more snappy. This is sad to see, because there are stable, nice, and fast DE's, like Budgie. Or KDE, of course, but I'm more of a GTK person.

> like Budgie

I also would like it more if System76 contributed to existing project like Bugie instead. It's tiresome how GNOME monoculture is dictating everything in GTK nowdays.

Colorful language aside, you're right.

Unity was perhaps the biggest blunder in all of Linux-dom in terms of getting this OS out there; Ubuntu was sitting on the perfect opportunity to pull the rug from under Microsoft at XPs end of life -- could have just done "Hey, you want a simple, ultra-stable, ultra-familiar experience now that XP is gone?" And keep something Gnome2-ish and be the Volvo of computers.

And instead went with "Let's see if we can out-sexy Apple!" No. You can't. Ugh.

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