In part, this is why Apple can give their customers such a polished, "just works" experience. Buy all-Apple gear, and stay in their software ecosystem, and (modulo bugs) everything will work together seamlessly.
I don't like this outcome by any means. And I still think that some desktop components certainly benefit from loose coupling and well-defined interfaces, and it's possible to avoid the "polish" downsides in some cases. But doing everything that way, while still being able to put everything together in a polished way, might actually be impossible.
This is not an uncommon view. However I can’t help but be convinced it’s the main reason the year of Linux on the Desktop hasn’t happened yet.
The user really does want their computer to seem like just one “thing,” at least in the way that it comes out of the box. When we visit websites it’s understood that these pages don’t interact with each other and weren’t designed to work together.
The OS, on the other hand, is supposed to be a system per the name.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/o2a0kp/there_are...
My point was that windows is the most popular OS despite it having a ridiculous amount of “native” looks. So linux not having one is not the reason for its less than ideal desktop uptake.
Besides, as bad as Windows’ UI fragmentation is, Linux’s is worse. When opening a Linux application, from Pidgin to Firefox to the control panel to Telegram, there is absolutely no guarantee of what you’ll be getting. Having 7 design languages is bad, but what’s worse is having 0.
(But KDE? I don't know, I don't use it much, but it seems like at least their stuff is mostly-compatible-if-you-work-it-a-bit, unlike Gnome's full on hostility to 'cross-compatibility.')
I am not sure why you think they don't have a "share-it-back" mentality or why you would wish any project failure. They use mostly the same set of open source licenses as KDE.
As a lawyer, I hate to inform you that the entire point of licenses is to put real teeth on ideas that people are likely to renege on. LIKE HERE.
I'm not trying to "fix issues." I'm trying to point out that, sure, Gnome may be technically following the rules, but the entire project is being a collective jerk about it.
Now, we can go deeper on why -- I have no reason to believe individual developers are jerks. I understand there there's money and influence and (cargo-culting) pressure from large companies involved.
But presently - Gnome is a collective putting out a product that is harmful to the environment -- not in an ecological way, but one that reinforces bad ideas about how to make software, aka "only do the bare minimum to comply with the license, otherwise try to dominate via whatever means possible."
Edit: In my experience, pointing out how someone is a jerk doesn't really help in open source either. That usually just causes them to become defensive and only increases the hostility. Since the code is open it's much better to just fix it for yourself and not worry about what someone else thinks. That is, if you think the situation is truly unrecoverable. If not, then it's better to set aside your differences and work it out.
They were "We have a good thing with this Unix deal and how we do it, we share freely, backwards AND FORWARD. How might we continue this in a wider fashion; knowing that some might be inclined to take and not give back?"
And thus, the GPL was born. MIT-style licenses are fine in some cases, but you're working of the back of Linux, and that's GPL territory.
"Some have proposed alternatives to the GPL that require modified versions to go through the original author. As long as the original author keeps up with the need for maintenance, this may work well in practice, but if the author stops (more or less) to do something else or does not attend to all the users' needs, this scheme falls down. Aside from the practical problems, this scheme does not allow users to help each other."
It's pretty explicitly spelled out here that it is absolutely what they meant, it wouldn't work at all if it wasn't "here's some code, do what you want with it."
If someone is trying to get you to take a case along the lines, I would have to say don't take it, it's probably not going to be a winner.
Don't feel discouraged if your first contributions didn't make it in, GNOME is a big project so I'm sure you could find some other areas to contribute to if you really wanted. Keep in mind that core areas such as the shell and GTK are probably bad places for first time contributors as they tend to be very complex, it's best to start with a smaller app/library and go from there. Of course if you don't want to contribute then you don't have to either, but I think all of this applies to most large open source projects that I have seen.
You're painting this out to be a personal issue, which it isn't. The culture among GNOME developers is one of the most toxic I've ever seen, and it's continuing to poison a desktop environment I desperately want to love. Every time I suggest something I get shut down though, so why bother? Why would I willingly hurt myself in the process of trying to make a usable desktop? The only thing I can do now is share my experience as a warning to other developers who want to make Linux-native experiences: GNOME does not want your help, don't waste your time trying.
On those individual things, you can certainly make apps outside flatpak although on a technical level I think that flatpak (or a similar packaging mechanism) is going to be the best option for a great number of apps, and I would expect that to become the focus for many app developers just because it's a lot easier and saves time. I think that comment about Adwaita is pretty inflammatory and may be seen as being against the code of conduct, not sure, but it certainly isn't my view and I doubt it is the view of the majority of contributors.
"neglecting basic functionality like thumbnails in the filepicker for almost two decades, even with literally hundreds of pull requests with suggested fixes."
I mentioned this elsewhere but I'm very disappointed to see this issue get continuously brought up, I don't think there is much we can say that is productive at this point. I've never seen a pull request from this that was actually finished to completion. Is there someone in particular you're waiting for to approve this? If so, can you think of something that could help them out? Or do you think they don't want help at all? Because from my perspective, that is not the case.
Edit: Also, hundreds of pull requests to implement thumbnails? Is that an exaggeration? I'd like to see a list of all of those if possible.
Keep in mind, it's not unusual for a large patch to go through many revisions before finally making it in. Take a look at the Linux kernel for another example, you don't have to look far to see many patches that take a long time to go through review or just never make it in because of various reasons. I don't think you are being fair by painting this as a GNOME behavior, it is simply reality on large projects with a lot of complexity and moving parts. It sounds like you are also saying systemd suffers from the same issues (it probably does) but unfortunately it seems that is another area where it's a complex problem space, so that's the trade-off that you make.
Don't worry about my project, I'm only commenting here to help you and to explain that those other opinions are not shared by everyone. In fact commenting on social media is usually a waste for my projects as it only seems to attract more negative/toxic comments from people who (incorrectly) assume that I share all my opinions with an upstream project or something like that.
Both work out of the box on almost any distro, just fine
Compiling everything has always been a very niche hobby limited to mostly Gentoo and similar distribution users.
What we've maybe always being diffident about is app bundles, big images of apps with all their dependencies most of which duplicates of already installed libraries.
But I guess we're moving on from that with snap, flatpack and the likes gaining traction.
You: "it has become much better with wayland and is improving fast".
Two comments above you: "wayland has been a steaming pile of crap since it still can't work in basic graphics modes 10+ years after being announced, to the fact that it has loads of quirks that vary from one environment to another."
The typical conservative mentality.
That is a misconception that I've noticed, maybe it's because KDE uses different APIs for a lot of things, or maybe it's because of the way some distributions package it. But none of the Linux desktops are really that tightly coupled when you actually dig into it. For example managing the desktop settings is handled by its own daemon appropriately called "gnome-settings-daemon" that loads all its settings modules via a plugin system. KDE is structured similarly in that its code is split across a great number of small support libraries. If there is no secondary consumer of those APIs it's probably because nobody has bothered yet to make and test additional combinations of packages that actually work.