GNOME is at least usable now due to a mix of performance improvements over the years and faster hardware, but it still eats RAM (my current session is running at 3.4GB RSS with just the AppIndicators extension).
But, I wonder had GNOME not gone this direction whether the Linux desktop wouldn't be so fragmented as it is now.
Linux has always appealed to tinkerers and that was always going to lead to some amount of fragmentation. I don’t think it’s a bad thing necessarily. For all of the complaints about it, systemd has unified a lot of things that used to be handled through desktop environments and made things less fragmented as a whole.
That's a really fringe window manager.
Not a desktop environment like the others.
I believe ratpoison is the granddaddy of today's tiling desktops, which have a decent following.
I know. I'm using i3 as I write, bit no desktop environment.
But I suppose it could go either way - ratpoison itself didn't have a very large user base, but it spawned a decent one if you count its successors.
Agree. Ratpoison itself was barely usable.
But the seeds of what became GNOME 3 were sown in first 3 releases of GNOME 2, not in widely discussed but unrelated to actual decisions talks about patents.
People want to customize their desktops. One way that could happen is through having some sort of grand super-flexible window manager than can do anything, and then customize their behavior in some configuration language. Another way is for interested folks to write their window managers in C or whatever language they want. The latter is usually more performant, and has less social coordination overhead, so it was the way things worked out.
I mean, we have Windows and Apple, with all the programmer-hours spent on their window managers, and they aren’t anywhere near as flexible as the open source ecosystem.