Comment by kayoone | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kayoone | Hacker News Reader

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I agree. Id say the Linux desktop will probably never drastically improve because of this massive NIH-syndrome. So much development resources go into maintaining dozens of forks of popular Desktop enviroments (Unity, Gnome3, Mate, Cinnamon, GnomeShell, KDE, XFCE etc) that its not even funny anymore. Choice isnt always good.

The sheer flexibility and number of choices for each and every part of the linux desktop world makes the whole experience chaotic, inconsistent, buggy and complex to setup and maintain. And as thats the DNA of Linux and Open-Source, it probably wont change. And while awesome, that DNA makes it nearly impossible to have a Linux Desktop experience that will ever rival the closed ones in terms of day-to-day usability.

> The sheer flexibility and number of choices for each and every part of the linux desktop world makes the whole experience chaotic, inconsistent, buggy and complex to setup and maintain.

I think that's what vendors like ubuntu should be for. They should focus on stability and planning.

Instead they just keep doing their own thing for a audience that might very well not exist.

Exactly. Ubuntu started out to be the mainstream distro that just makes the linux desktop experience smooth and free of worries, but instead they now build just another desktop experience on their own. Even for Ubuntu you have Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Mint and-i-dont-know-what else...thats just the wrong approach imo.

That's because people don't figure out that every Linux can run every WM or desktop environment anyway. So they need a seperate distribution just to switch from Unity to KDE...

I think if you're a very basic user, you can get a consistent experience just because you can use the included desktop in Ubuntu or some other distro and not run into many problems. However, your experience will still be inferior to that of OSX since Apple has put more efforts into applications like Mail, iPhoto and iTunes.

If you're an advanced user (as all of the readers here would probaby be), you'll quickly end up in the situation you describe.

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