> What exactly is a "compelling desktop experience?" It seems to me that when people say this they really mean "win the popularity contest against Microsoft." I'm not sure that's at all a worthwhile or laudable goal.
I don't care about Microsoft or Apple. I don't like Windows and I don't like macOS. I care about my desktop. The one that I am typing in. I really, really hope I don't actually have to explain all of the problems with the Linux desktop experience right now, I don't have the energy. I've helped a lot of people try to make Linux work for them and it's a soul-crushing experience every time because I often have to explain that there is in fact, no great options for them right now because shit is simply broken. The X11 and Wayland situation is a perfect example: "Oh no problem. You can just choose between your windows scaling properly and your high refresh rate monitor working, and being able to actually use screensharing during meetings." Sure it's getting better, but we've got a lot of work to go, there's no sugarcoating it.
> It's incredibly easy. It just depends on what distribution you use. For example, on Gentoo, this is not at all a problem.
Look, if the person has to be proficient enough to be able to install and operate Gentoo as their primary desktop operating system, I'm pretty sure they do not need my help when it comes to doing virtually anything with Linux. It's also pretty easy to run old versions of software on NixOS but I'd argue this is basically cheating.
What's hard to do is take any of the most popular distros and run something from 1999. (I'm pretty sure that's actually generally hard to do on Gentoo as well, but whatever.) That's what I'm really talking about.
> This is a hint that you got something wrong. Remember when desktops used to be configurable? I guess letting the user control their own environment stopped being "compelling" when Microsoft decided so. Do we have to follow suit?
What exactly about modern KDE isn't configurable enough? I use both KDE and SwayWM as daily driver desktop setups and never felt hindered much by the available configuration options. If anything, KDE offers so much customization that it's probably sometimes detrimental.
Configuration options come at a cost, and that's exactly why modern software has less of it. We want higher quality software, but it's hard to make software more robust when you have trillions of code paths and most of them are almost completely unused. This stuff adds up. In a similar vein, I hate to see Linux lose support for old hardware, but if something's been broken in mainline for five years straight, I'm pretty sure they have every reason to assume it's not being used by anyone.
What I'm really talking about with "the new thing also sucks" is more reflecting on the growing pains of things like Wayland and PulseAudio (and a bit with Pipewire though less so.) I am of course not saying that the same thing doesn't happen with desktop environments, personally I don't like GNOME 3, but also in the same vein, it'd be hard to argue GNOME 3 has been getting worse this whole time, it offers much more customization and is a lot more robust than it was when it first launched.