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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

That core would be GNOME or KDE frameworks, coupled with the FreeDesktop standards, at least that was the plan about 20 years ago.

However as the site says doing distributions is what most folks keep doing, and naturally there isn't a single stack that can keep up with snowflake distributions.

In the end, Google took the Linux kernel, placed two core set of frameworks, one in Java, and the other in JavaScript, and naturally those are the winning Linux distributions for regular consumers.

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None of that core is standardized across even a hand full of distros.

Chrome/Chromium is quite standardized, across many distros.

Name one distro that ships with chrome out of the box? I dont even think ubuntu comes with a chromium browser. That means devs cant write apps against it and just hand out exes like they do on Mac and windows.

Play Protect Certified Android and ChromeOS are popular ones among consumers

Nice. Maybe more desktop distros should build on android as a core. That could solve a lot of problems.

I agree. With how much resources are invested into Android for offering an OS for consumers, desktop Linux distros using the freedesktop stack are missing out. It is not easy for distros to acknowledge the sunk cost.

Chromium is the default browser on Raspberry Pi OS.

Naturally, you missed the part I mentioned it was the plan 20 years ago, not how it looks like today.

tldr

Which is the entire point. Having working software beats having a standard. (Naturally having working software that adheres to a standard is even better, but at least they got their priorities right.)

That's great, but then don't complain to your community for creating more distros? Thats the thing they are good at, because they have been given great tools to do so.

You are talking about Android and Chrome OS right? I agree, those are the top two Linux distributions, and everything else is behind by an absolutely huge margin

Yep. Just browse their documentation, that is the kind of development experience GNOME and KDE were expected to provide, 20 years ago, yet fail short due to Linux distributions fragmentation, the devs using other environments, or still stuck with plain window managers and xterms workflows.

If only GNOME and KDE were backed by one of the largest companies in the world, with tens of billions of dollars at its disposal.

If you mean Red-Hat in regards to GNOME, they have long moved away from Desktop Linux for consumers, as there is no money to be made there.

The Slashdot posts on the matter from those days are quite easy to find.

GNOME like CDE in his day, is good enough for corporate users to connect into Linux servers.

GNOME today is also not the same as GNOME 20 years ago, it got rebooted multiple times with incompatible code, glade was dropped and now people are expected to write their GUIs in code or manual XML code (yes I am aware of the Web based ongoing replacement, what a broken idea for a native desktop), and plenty of other issues that make GNOME in 2023 even less atractive than 20 years ago.

NeXT under Steve Jobs had a maximum of 500 people working with him in .

There has been much more efforts than that in desktop linux.

Yet NeXT delivered a mostly coherent programming platform, back in the 1990s.

One thing NeXT didn't do is to introduce shitloads of useless complexity with fragmentation for the sake of it and half assed solutions on top of that.

NeXT had Steve Jobs. And I don't mean a man of his calibre, I mean a person saying yes and no to features. This is sorely lacking in the open-source world, where they have a total aversion to any kind of structure and oversight.

There is no standard at freedesktop. Everything is a moving target, just like KDE and Gnome.

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