Surprisingly I find linux quite guilty of the neverending gui papercut too (it's a bazaar after all).
Sadly Microsoft is kinda forced to follow the trends, everything moves in all direction (web, phones).
Sadly Microsoft is kinda forced to follow the trends, everything moves in all direction (web, phones).
Former Microsoftie here. While they are following trends, the actual impetus behind all the little changes you see all the time is that managers and ICs are incentivized to make "impactful" changes if they want good performance reviews. UI changes are a pretty easy way to have "impact". You can say something in your review like, "and X million users used the new taskbar that's in the middle of the screen".
When organizations are small, you have the resources to evaluate performance on a case by case basis because everyone works with everyone else to some degree. When organizations grow and you have layers of bureaucracy, inevitably some asshole middle manager gives someone a bad review for a bullshit reason (jealousy, racism, dislike, etc).
That's when HR swoops in and starts making processes and standards for everything to shield the company from lawsuits. Crucially, these processes and standards don't necessarily prevent the problem, but just let the company's lawyers argue that they tried to prevent the problem.
Now that you have processes and standards for everything, employees start gaming the system. The goal is no longer "do the thing that makes the company succeed". The company is so big that relatively few individuals have the power to swing the company's fortunes one way or the other. Instead, the goal is now "maximize my career growth".
Then you end up in the nonsense FAANGM situation where individual little teams are putting out crap and making decisions that make the company look dumb. Things that would be easy to ignore if a significant fraction of teams weren't doing it. All because they're doing things that maximize their "impact".
This is hard to correct because you don't want to be too harsh with your teams and hurt morale, and it's not like it's every team. So you try to be flexible, be tolerant of missteps as long as people show improvement, because if you just fired everybody who made boneheaded decisions in the name of "impact", the hit to moral would cause terrible attrition problems. And worse, some of them would sue the company, which was the problem you were trying to avoid in the first place.
s/company/university/g as needed.
It's one of those classic situations where every individual step in the process does at least kind of make sense, but the end result is bonkers.
Linux (and FLOSS in general) gives you the choice to have it the way you want it.
Also if you go past the 3 main desktops there are many many window managers, standalone launchers, panels from which you can pick up the pieces you want to build something you like.
The only thing really changing right now is Wayland and the switch from window manager to compositors and the related support software. There are getting to be a decent amount of options in that regard with a good crop of lightweight compositors and tools starting to mature.
I remember being excited when I saw the first beta test of KDE but it seemed each version got a little bit worse after that and that's been the trajectory of the Linux desktop since 1995 or so.
awk, grep, tail, nginx and all that kind of stuff is fine.
(I tried taking the 1050 card from my media server I used for AI training long ago and put it in another cheap Linux box and put SteamOS on it. They claim it can run Windows games but it won't run anything out of my steam account including the games that the proton database claims works. That's the kind of brokenness as the expected condition that is endemic to the Linux GUI)
If I found a GUI app worked on Linux I'd be so surprised I'd have to file a feature report with their feature tracker.
Xorg has worked for decades, a multitude of window managers and desktop environments have been perfectly usable for decades, and a couple of million people (going by Steam HW survey results) seem to be able to run games via proton perfectly fine.
Doesn't mean you have to think it's perfect, doesn't mean you have to use it for everything, but 'can't use any GUI app on linux' is definitely a you problem.