I'm glad that System76 wants to create their own DE, with actual graphics/UX designers.
With a few key changes like bringing back the minimize button by default, integrating the dash-to-dock extension by default, and dropping the crusade against proper menubars it’d be easily the most well rounded and DE with the most usable out-of-the-box experience.
KDE shares the problem of muddled focus between desktop and mobile, but instead of lacking functionality instead has issues with its design feeling somewhat amateur, as well as bad defaults. KDE can be great if tuned extensively but without tuning it’s a mess.
I do agree that’s it’s good to have more players in the DE space, because no existing option has fully cracked it and more options is always good. It would be nice if more DEs shared work between each other (is it really necessary for there to be 3+ forks of Nautilus?) but oh well.
What I want to see most is a new UI library. Qt is nice from a technical perspective, but it being tied to C++ and thus lacking quality, up to date, idiomatic bindings for other languages really hurts it, as does its licensing shuffle. GTK is wonderfully flexible because it has bindings for almost every language ever, but comes with frequent breaking changes and forced GNOMEisms, and feels awkward outside of Linux. The ideal UI library would have GTK’s flexibility with QT’s technical strengths and platform adaptivity.
Until about a half year ago, when I decided to stay vanilla on a fresh install. After a week, I forgot why I needed all these tweaks.
I think the far majority people, myself included, can't even tell the difference in UX quality (as long as it is above a certain level) and will mostly like or dislike based on what they are used to.
So System76 is going to go NIH. Let's see how that goes.
I feel almost the opposite. I think Plasma and GNOME are both really good, and some others I haven't bothered to try yet because I'm pretty happy on Plasma (Budgie, Pantheon) seem thoughtfully designed and reasonably featureful. Plus there are good tiling WMs you can use on any of them!
I feel like there are more good options on Linux than anywhere else. macOS has designers galore and it falls flat on core window management functionality, like its stupid minimize/maximize behavior, lack of window snapping, lack of tiling, lack of click-anywhere resizing, and other DE basics, like configuring global keyboard shortcuts.
But I welcome System76's effort, too! I hope it's so good it makes me switch. :)
We should learn our lessons and don't trust some designer that probably does not use the project to design good UX, a designer should use the project(app or webpage or DE heavily) before deciding ro remove some feature just because he read in a book that too much options can cause issue to some mythical average user.
If they don't even have the resources to work on the toolkit level, how do they expect to get the resources to work on a full desktop stack?
Bad call, imho. But hey - I think Rust is an excellent choice.
If the price of having to use e.g. Ubuntu is having to run Gnome, I'll pay it just to get the other benefits.
I guess that here we really need to figure out which end users we are talking about, to understand what they actually want.
To me, and perhaps some others, DEs like XFCE are pretty close to perfection - low resource usage, good performance, good usability, decent customization (as long as you don't want to do anything fancy, just get your windows to show up in a panel or two, and add a few widgets for resource display, clock, language switching etc.).
To users like me, the finer points of the DEs out there that have more fancy graphical elements or in depth customization, like KDE, are pretty much lost or are not really relevant. In my experience, most of the problems with the modern Linux desktop experience are created by the software, that has inconsistent element placements, varying button sizes, different UI frameworks altogether and so on. However, as long as the software works, i also don't find myself caring too much, even if things could be better.