Linux Desktop Kinda Stinks. How Did We Get Here? [video]

Asking open source developers for design and usability is kinda like asking a mechanic to create a car or a construction worker to create good architecture. They can produce something but it's probably not an inspired work of art.

Bottom line: The open source movement is a coding thing. There are too many open source developers and not enough open source designers. It takes both to produce good, consistent, usable software products.

Now we have a lot of DE forks and I think we don’t need them.

I still like Gnome, I like what Gnome 40 did. I wish I could get it on Ubuntu, I’m thinking about switching to Fedora just to get stock Gnome 40.

KDE look awesome for people who like that type of Desktop.

I tried Mate and XFCE and have a slight preference for XFCE. I would love it if the two could somehow combine efforts and maybe establish a real contender for a third desktop.

LXQT is done. It looks good for people who want something slim with a more classical windows like layout. I honestly think the Trinity Desktop people should probably just look at what they would miss from KDE 3 in LXQT and see if they can port those parts over and just join LXQT.

I would love it if Bodhi just got over itself and started working with mainline Enlightenment. Maybe Pop!_OS should do the same.

But other than that we still have Cinnamon, Pantheon and Deepin. All (if I remember correctly) build on or forked from Gnome and probably not going away. I think Pantheon and Deepin could probably work together on one DE separate from Gnome. Maybe Cinnamon could join Mate and XFCE?

I get it. KDE 3 to KDE 4 and Gnome 3 to Gnome 3 was a hard transition. But could we please get away from the idea that every freaking distro needs its own damn DE or one that is so customized it might as well be? We have to many desktops with to many distro specific customizations for no gain to the end users.

Turns out the technical implementation of these environments isn't even half of the story, a lot of oftentimes unseen work goes into integrating them with distros, which can cause problems when the people behind the projects have differing views in regards to where they should go.

Now, i might not find all of what he says agreeable or even relevant to me (since i tend to just use XFCE), but maybe someone else would appreciate his take, or like to discuss this a bit more.

Then the video keeps talking about desktop environments, which are an optional and tiny part of what a desktop OS is all about. You don't even need a DE for GUIs (doing fine with a window manager, thank you very much)

None of this happens on Windows or macOS.