> Why?!?
I really wish that wasn't the case.
But I've been using Linux since '96, and Unix for way longer than that, and it has always been the case, so likelihood of it remaining that way is high at this point.
Second, I believe it is a characteristic of the Open Source world: anything can be forked and evolved, which leads to a very complex ecosystem, especially when it comes to GUIs. The commercial OS vendors don't really have to deal with that issue.
Third: hardware evolves, and very fast. Super hirez screen are a good example, and the need for thinking about GUIs in centimeters rather than in pixels is something that has caught all OS builders by surprise. Commercial providers built a a solution quickly, and the OpenSource world will eventually catch up, but they'll be late to the game, as usual.
Another example is CPU's with heterogeneous cores, which it took the Linux folks quite a while to adjust to.
Or at a more trivial level, the back-lighting of my laptop keyboard.
This state of affairs (OpenSource software lagging behind wrt H/W evolution) is very likely to continue: H/W makers have, in general, almost zero incentive in providing drivers and/or early technical support for Linux.
Oh, and btw: people believe they do that because opensourcing drivers would expose their intellectual property (see NVidia as one of the worst offenders). In reality, the truth is that it would expose for all to see how shitty, buggy and badly written their software actually is, and therefore they never do it.
Net result: H/W has to be adjusted to after the fact by the OSS community (reverse engineering and whatnot), systematically leading to this chronic problem with OpenSource and H/W.
I buy a new laptop every two years, wipe windows and install Linux. In over thirty years of doing this, I have yet to see a single time where every device in the laptop worked properly right after the install. Never happened.
Yet, I am still a happy user: I do, to a large extent, control what happens on my computer.
The same can't be said anymore of either of Android, OSX, Windows, Chrome