Just what Linux needs, more fragmentation.
Sure, this may come off polemic, but I very much think that gnome is largely to blame for the fragmentation of the Linux desktop.
Ubuntu tried to do the same more than once, but fell so hard on their face every time that it can be hard to tell that they were trying to do the same thing.
If Gnome wouldn't had poped up Linux would have a standard desktop named KDE likely today.
So the claim that they caused fragmentation seems not completely off.
If KDE had not started with this flaw, I would agree with you.
For the most part, the Linux Desktop has been a majority using some variation of GNOME with a dedicated minority using KDE.
I have not used “GNOME” since the 2.x days but I have always been in the GNOME world. Even XFCE is really another base for GNOME.
I have not used KDE since the 2.x days either but current Plasma is pretty good and I do not mind it. I put Big Linux on a laptop and have not taken its version on KDE off yet.
KDE wouldn't be commercial.
Qt didn't have the ideal license back than but you could use it free.
At the point KDE would be the de facto standard Unix desktop there would have been enough power behind that to arrive in the end at the exact same compromise regarding Qt that we have now, I'm quite sure.
There was no need to split the Unix desktop forever, and cause infinite pain as a result, by invoking the nuclear option, which the Gnome people did!
And given the further background story of one of the most prominent people behind that whole story you can even construct a reasonably believable "conspiracy theory" around the things that happened… ;-)
Also there are quite some other DEs. Only that there are just two big ones. If one of the big ones would not exist there would be a default one with the greatest market share.
Normal people don't reinvent the wheel when there is no need for that…
There was no need to split KDE. And Gnome exist solely for political reasons. Like I said, look at the history.
In the beginning there was only KDE. And it was regarded THE Unix desktop.
No sane people worked on anything else!
But than Gnome was created as a KDE clone. Solely for political reasons…
Look at the history again. Look at the names on the emails and posts.
It was done by people, because they wanted it done. For “solely political reasons”? But that’s exactly what politics means: making sure people get what they want. As opposed to everyone having what you want.
It did exactly this!
Gnome was created because some people didn't like the Qt license.
There had been zero technical reasons. Still people decided to start form scratch just to have a different license.
> Look at the names on the emails and posts.
Good point!
There is one very special name on that list. Someone who turned out being a Microsoft u-boot according to some very popular "conspiracy theory"…
So if you like conspiracy theories you may add "divide et impera" to the possible reasons for the existence of Gnome. ;-)
> But that’s exactly what politics means: making sure people get what they want. As opposed to everyone having what you want.
It's irrelevant what I would like to have.
The relevant question was and is what would have been best for the Linux desktop as a whole.
Do you really want to argue that the miserable split where everything gets done at least twice is a good outcome?
Yes, I hope people will discover that truth.
And yes, it was the Gnome people who choose the nuclear option!
I use both GNOME and KDE daily for different use cases, and the fact that people like you who hold such views exist is downright disturbing.
That was CDE and for sure nothing like KDE or Gnome.
Gnome 3 brushed people the wrong way but blaming it for fragmentation when those 3 went away to do their 3 different things doesn't make sense.
Come on, MATE and Cinnamon ? To be consistent Cinnamon shouldn't exist and only MATE would make the cut if Gnome 3 is the problem.
Numbers I can find speak for themselves though: https://eylenburg.github.io/de_comparison.htm
There's no fragmentation, only KDE and Gnome.
If Rust helps us actually improve and change things, then fine.
Chrome is actually one of the browsers that had KDE file picker integration early on. Initially it called kdialog, now it uses xdg-desktop-portal.
But anyway I should really give an RPM based distro a go at some point.
The community spreads its efforts thin into a thousand projects rather than making one amazing one.
I don't think that a FOSS community will ever converge on an amazing DE without part of it breaking apart and starting a new one, for the sake of building something even more amazing or failing on the way.
EDIT: I know ChromeOS exists, but that's a lot more than a desktop environment (can't even run a compiler natively for all intents and purposes iirc).
You can move from Gnome Shell to this without having to change the software you use.
The, perhaps unrealistic and naive, thinking behind this is that if these capable people combined their efforts into one desktop environment, we'd have one great Linux desktop environment, instead of several okay desktop environments.
Cosmic exists because Gnome devs have their own roadmap that many people dislike.
Sometime I wonder what can they pull off if KDE team, Gnome team, XFCE team and now Cosmic team got together.
Diversity is a strength of Linux. I don't think Pepsi worries about fragmentation with their various flavors of Pepsi, Mountain Dew, and whatever other hundreds of brands they own. Sure, diversity can be a problem if there aren't enough developers to go around but I'd rather have more options than fewer.
Do you guys complain because there is more than 1 game studio? You'd rather have one movie/serie and a handful of actors director so all movies and series are made by the same team in order to not waste ressources? A single house architecture plan so that everyone live in the very same house with no customisation possible?
Use a different operating system if you want your vendor to tie you up and tell you what to do. Buy a pretty toaster if you want a slick appliance— not a computer.
I'm sick of this complaint, which boils down to this: desktop Linux (taken collectively) isn't very much like a product for consumers by a vendor who wants to suck you into their ecosystem.
Guess what? That's *what's good* about the Linux desktop.
If you want a no-choice monoculture whose design better supports a thriving hellscape of proprietary crapware, you've got options already. If you want to be a consumer instead of a participant in a community and a tradition, go buy something.
I'll buy/build a Linux desktop when we get quality hardware and software options (where "good hardware" means more than "fast CPU! big memory!"), but for now Mac is a pretty good experience. You can't hack around the source code for proprietary programs (I've pretty much never wanted to do this on any desktop system), but you can run open source alternatives for everything except maybe some core software.
I realize I come off as extreme here, but that's really how I feel.
I think that's an obviously fair way to describe the Microsoft Store and the Google Play Store. (Idk about iOS' App Store because I don't use iOS.)
I'd also make the argument that it's a good way to describe the setup of basically any macOS power user, with their inevitable collection of brittle, mostly proprietary, solo dev apps they use to hack basic functionality back into Apple's anemic OS offering.
(Windows suffers from that latter problem, too, though it's not as egregious as macOS.)
> you can run open source alternatives for everything except maybe some core software.
The core software is pretty much what we're talking about here: DEs and/or bundled apps.
> for now Mac is a pretty good experience
I understand that many people like it and I think their reasons for liking it are mostly good. But for me, using macOS is genuinely miserable, not just a little off. And I think the kind of app ecosystem that Mac people really love, of thoughfully designed, hidden gems by very small teams or individual devs, distributed as proprietary software for a small fee... is just not that great. To an extent that Mac lovers rarely admit or don't understand, a huge proportion of those apps exist only to compensate for Apple's own oversights, which wouldn't matter so much in an open ecosystem. The rest just aren't worth the cost of a closed ecosystem, in my opinion.
Respectfully, this seems like a really out-of-touch perspective.
The software I use for Mac is a melange of open source and proprietary. I basically just use whatever is the least painful; sometimes that's open source, sometimes it's proprietary. Virtually every piece of software I use is high quality, and Mac doesn't really encumber my ability to use best-in-class software.
Linux desktop software is by far more brittle--it has to play nicely across a dizzying array of systems all while using crumby, buggy GUI toolkits from the 90s. Basic things like hidpi, webcam, (good) touchpad support are very unlikely to work out of the box if at all. Further still, support for popular apps can be really hit-or-miss on Linux. Not sure what the state of the world is, but for a good long time Spotify wasn't available on Linux. Yeah, I get that Spotify is proprietary and thus evil, but I don't really care about ideology, I want to be able to listen to my music without jumping through hoops (I would work around the limitation by using the web interface, but it was buggier and clearly a second-class citizen).
Like, I would love to be a Linux desktop user, and I often find myself daydreaming about how to build a Linux desktop platform that doesn't suck--it's not like I'm a MacOS partisan or anything. It's just that today, MacOS is wayyyy better than the Linux desktop. Linux can get there, but we really need to get rid of a bunch of cruft and build on a saner foundation (frankly, we should just use web APIs for building apps--something like ChromeOS but without the restrictions on what a program can do).
Mainly a DOS/Windows user for about five or six years, then Linux for about eight or nine (mostly Gentoo and, later, Ubuntu), macOS for my serious-business desktop needs since 2011.
To this part of your comment: Wut.
I truly have no clue what you mean by this. I think I use one program that might fit this description (Spectacle—which has several active replacements I could switch to, and still works perfectly, not so much as a single glitch, bug, or bit of jank that I've ever seen, despite its having been abandoned years ago)
Meanwhile, "brittle and relying on tons of solo-dev apps to hack in basic functionality" (ok, mostly not proprietary ones, sure) is about how I would have described desktop Linux. But... I suspect we have different definitions of "basic functionality".
Power management I never have to think about or fiddle with is table-stakes for me these days, for instance—I don't got time for that shit these days, a computer that can't do that fairly competently without my telling it what to do is just broken, same as a thermostat if I had to go poke it every single time I wanted the AC or heat to kick on, then watch carefully to make sure it actually did what I wanted, would be broken.
A good default en keyboard layout (why would the default not be a good one? It boggles the mind—and sure, that's a distro concern, not a "Linux" concern, but so's everything that matters on Linux).
"Find my" or equivalent.
Low jitter and reasonably consistent latency, at least under light load.
Solid, well-considered, capable, well-functioning accessibility features.
A trackpad good enough I don't even consider taking my mouse unless I'll be gone several days.
Bluetooth audio that works well enough that I don't hate it and spend no more than a minute or two a week fiddling with (and that mostly because I also use the same devices on Windows).
Seamless password & payment sync across all my (non-server) devices, relying on biometrics on all of them so I rarely have to type a password at all.
I'd be "hack[ing] in" all of that—and far, far more—back in on Linux, if I could attain it at all, and that stuff—the stuff that I rely on weekly, if not multiple times a day—is what I regard as "the basics".
I'd also still be using exactly one of those "thoughtfully designed, hidden gems by very small teams or individual devs, distributed as proprietary software for a small fee" text editors if I went back to Linux. Sublime beats anything else I've used on Linux, and it's not a close contest—failing that, something from Jetbrains. Open source editors and IDEs would only enter the picture if I somehow couldn't get Sublime or something from Jetbrains. Meanwhile, I struggle to think of anything else in that category that I use. It's mostly first-party or open-source. If I did more multimedia or GUI design I'd probably use a few more of those small-team proprietary programs, but I don't think it's controversial to assert that those largely blow anything available on Linux out of the water (except the ones that are cross-platform because they're—ugh—electron or browser-based, so do work on Linux) so it's not like I'm missing out on the riches of open-source, at least when it comes to that kind of thing.
You must have had some very bad experience with keyboard on Linux. Just curious: what was that?
Linux has good ones, I've just never seen one as the default; if you just click through the "happy path" you'll have a crap one, and there's little guidance on which you should pick if you need to, like, actually compose text in your native human language, so the user just has to know in advance or go look up which one to select.
Mac's default, meanwhile, is (at least) nearly as good as the best Linux has, so you can start fluently typing English without having to fiddle with settings or memorize weird number sequences (sure, there's still some memorization, but much of it's simpler and closer to making sense and far more guess-able than, say, a four-digit string of numbers). Last I checked, Windows gets this wrong, too. Why either of those operating systems does that, I have no idea. That it was even incorrect didn't occur to me, somehow, until I switched to Mac and was like "why isn't the default at least this good on every platform!?"
But then again, their design language has recently started to be less cohesive too (or more precisely, mix of older and newer design systems are apparent).
Like, it's generally difficult to get something working/looking nicely and consistently on Linux. A somewhat exception to this rule is GNOME, but even then there's issues with KDE/Qt app theming sometimes.
Like, until 2021 (I think) I lived with a broken looking inkscape and Krita (used it as a hobby) because I gave up trying to figure out how to fix the theming, since none of the fixes suggested online worked. Then one day after some random update it started working
So, there's a lot of space for improvement and better cross compatibility between these "subsystems"
Granted, though, it's getting better. But I assume not at a pace an average user can perceive. So, i thinking that's where people get frustrated.
I guess the thing I was thinking of being cohesive were stuff like context menus, or integrating better with the window manager (or whatever it's called on Windows) than they do on Linux (since you had to integrate with the only existing one, not choose one). My earlier complaint about Krita/Inkscape is that most "labels" rendered in a colour and labels that was almost indistinguishable from the background, so I was largely working with shortcuts, or from memory and sometimes squinting to see what I'm clicking lol. It was an issue with all non-gnome apps, but I mostly used those two.
I quitr remember that on Mac it is barely better.
Now take some specialized areas such as DAW, video editing software and 3D editors and you can just throw that idea of cohesion out of the window regardless of the OS.
On Linux, if you used Gnome but ran a KDE app (or were on Gnome but ran a GTK app) you'd by default get something that looked horrendous broken visually but worked, and sometimes the visuals actually managed to break the app (ie thing being out of proportion, or invisible etc). It would look great and cohesive if you ran a GTK app on Gnome, or a KDE app on KDE, etc.
I think it's gotten much better at some point when these environments decided to support each others themes, though.
I wish they all sat down and came up with a unified theming framework for apps (maybe based on CSS, since they kinda use CSS flavours already), but have the rest be implementation details. Dunno how realistic that is, though.
Windows I think I missed the mark actually. A lot of people pointed out stuff I didn't think about or forgot about (every Office Suite release looked different, Java apps etc, branded stuff like Adobe or specialist software, etc).
I think it might be because I never really used those apps that my much, since Windows was basically only my gaming OS
It's the age of Electron, baby! For better (more frequent cross-platform support, rapid app development, empowering the masses of web devs to create desktop apps without retooling) and for worse (non-native look-and-feel, high resource consumption). Nobody really has a cohesive collection of apps on their desktops anymore, not even Mac people.
> I think people mostly complain about a lack of cohesion that Windows/macOS have.
Like we've both noted to some extent here, I think this is pretty much a thing of the past. It can be pretty good on Linux, at the same time. If you stick to KDE or Gnome (which I think are both reasonable propositions), your desktop on Linux will be way, way more cohesive than Windows has ever been in my lifetime (maybe ever).
I don't know why some people seem to want a "one true desktop" monoculture.
The whole reason I use Linux is because I get to make choices that make sense for me.
There's this hope that if only for the fragmentation, Linux might finally have Photoshop or whatever.
I get it. I've contended with integrating disparate GUI frameworks on my system. I appreciate what Apple's virtual monopoly on app frameworks for macOS allows them to do in terms of accessibility and integrations and UI changes, in rapid, uniform ways.
But you can't impose uniformity on the Linux desktop without draining the oasis, without killing what makes it a breath of fresh air in the first place.
> ./GuitarPro
./GuitarPro: error while loading shared libraries: libssl.so.0.9.8: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
I bought this program several years ago while using a Mint 13 system - it won't run on Mint 20. Maybe I could set up a Docker, or copy the correct version of the libraries, or whatever - maybe it could be coaxed into working, maybe not - but while end users are likely to encounter this kind of roadblock Linux is just a non-starter as a platform for commercial software.
Many other libraries are similar. See: glibc...
At least the kernel promises not to break user space. I guess because user space keeps fucking itself.
If Adobe builds Photoshop for Red Hat and make it run only on Red Hat, people wanting to use Photoshop will install Red Hat. The big problem is what happens when Microsoft makes Excel work perfectly on Ubuntu and only on Ubuntu.
This is basically how Steam still works, pending the release of SteamOS 3.0, and it hasn't been a problem for other distros. They can sub in their own libs and repackage the thing or use an Ubuntu chroot.
This is what Snap and Flatpak are for though, and I think they'll handle it well, going forward.
(I actually liked your joke— even upvoted it before I wrote my rant lol. Sometimes you just gotta let it out!)