I'd bet the majority of the lightweight "Windows 95 clone" WMs and DEs exist because GNOME and (to a lesser extent) KDE alienated their userbases by trying to be "different" and "next generation" (mostly by poorly cloning OSX and the latest Windows version that nobody liked anyway), so I'd hesitate to say that experimentation should be left to them.
EDIT: Many commercial products suffer from this problem where the existing version is "good enough" and people are happy using it for several hours a day, but the producer needs to convince users to purchase the new version anyway, so they end up adding a lot of pointless, irritating, and even product-breaking changes just to make the new version seem revolutionary and worthy of an upgrade, even if it's actually making the product worse. Many open source devs don't seem to have realized that there is no reason for them to play this game. They don't need to sell anyone a new version in a cardboard box, so there's no conflict of interest here; they can do less work and make their users more happy by keeping things stable and incrementally improving things. Yet, very often, they ape Microsoft, Adobe, and company's spastic thrashing anyway. More ribbons!
In fact, I would go so far as to say that the only time when a massive change to the desktop environment is warranted is when there's a massive change to the physical method that people use to interact with computers. The widespread availability of the mouse gave rise to the now-familiar WIMP paradigm. The introduction of multi-touch triggered another round of innovation, but I doubt that this can be backported to keyboard-and-mouse devices any more than Photoshop can be backported to mouseless terminals.
Sometimes change is good. Just because we do something one particular way (in the world of desktop environments this is often down to a decision made in the early 90s) doesn't mean that it's the most productive method of doing it. Often initially unpopular changes in user interface prove to be more effective.
The problem is that change for changes sake is different to change for UI improvements sake, but the two are often hard to distinguish between. How do we know that a new UI implementation is better or worse than the old one? You don't really until it's being used in the real world. There's not an easy answer, but I don't think that grinding innovation to a halt is the right one. I guess the beauty of the open source world is that there's room for a minimal non-progressive UI as well as a number of innovative ones.
So the menu bar wins now, but principally because its learned (the hard way). Now it would be even harder to switch to anything else.
While it's obvious that MS would have a reason, I have no clue what that could be. The only thing I can think of is that people seem to use Google rather than their app's help functionality even if the latter would do a better job.
The Office team, however, seems to operate more or less independently from the Windows team. The ribbon, for example, was first unveiled around the time Windows Vista was released, but Vista had no ribbon anywhere. Windows 7 added the ribbon to a few random apps, like MS Paint. Windows 8 added it to a few more random apps, like File Explorer. But they don't seem to be in any hurry to unify the look and feel of their own flagship products.
Well, what else could we expect from a company that thinks it's OK to slap two completely different UIs (Metro and desktop) on the same OS? Microsoft UI is schizophrenic.
If I want an environment for my desktop, I'll use an environment designed for a desktop; like Windows 95 - 7, Gnome2, KDE3, Xfce and LXDE.
My desktop has a keyboard and a mouse, not a touchscreen. In fact, I really don't want to be touching my $1200 ZR30w monitor anyway, even if it were touch-enabled. Cell phone OSes on the desktop work about as well as desktop OSes do on cell phones. Play to strengths, do not reduce to the lowest common denominator.
If an idea objectively improves productivity, I will give it a fair chance. And we have certainly seen that since Windows 95: most notably with tabbed interfaces. But I can't stand change for the sake of change. Just because an idea is old does not mean it is bad.
LXQt seems like it could become what KDE should have been. All they really need is to also merge with the Trinity people.
http://sourceforge.net/p/cdesktopenv/wiki/Home/
It's not all about resources. I don't want animations for every action. For me simplicity is elegance.
I installed FreeBSD at home and attempted to emulate the setup, but never got it quite right.
If you care about UX innovation, LXDE is not for you. That niche is filled by KDE 4, Gnome 3, and Unity. With XP support ending, I've used LXDE (Lubuntu) to rescue 2 old family machines that Gnome 3 and KDE couldn't handle without thrashing.
How does the memory usage of LXQt Desktop compare to LXDE and Razor-qt? I hope they've managed to keep it down.
fluxbox - active and kind've interesting
awesome - more of just a WM than full DE
ratpoison - ditto
enlightenment - okay, kind've resembles Win 95 too... but more of a DE than the others you listed
windowmaker - been around forever; hasn't really "innovated" in forever; just a NeXT clone if I remember correctly for GNUStep
I think my point stands. I was talking about LXDE, Xfce, and RazorQT.
dat Typo. "étiolé"= withered in French.
>enlightenment - okay, kind've resembles Win 95 too... but more of a DE than the others you listed
> etoileos - last news update 2012 and wasn't even about the project
What you seem to be missing is that these projects died because people thought they were weird, which is to say, innovation in the DE space pays negative rent, and that's no good, especially not from the perspective of an open-source project, which, the social dynamics of open-source dictate that projects need to acquire a large userbase to sustain an active development community for more than a couple years, that is to say, to make people keep working on it after the "new project smell" wears off.
In other words your observation is a direct consequence of the choices in DE that users have made and continue to make.
The recent trend has been towards modularity, and while you dismiss awesome and ratpoison, a major boon of LXDE et al is that, unlike Windows 95, you can replace the window manager with xmonad and still use all of the other components of LXDE. Modularity brings innovation to the people who want it while satisfying the large majority of users who apparently do not.
There's no reason for LXDE to ship anything but Openbox; LXDE could certainly switch to xmonad tomorrow, but their users wouldn't be happy. And who wants that?
Actually, at least two of those (E and WindowMaker) remain alive. And WindowMaker's got its fervent fans (you're hearing from one here).
While Raster's continued to plink away at Enlightenment, among the reasons WindowMaker development's been so modest is that it accomplished its mission: provide an implementation of the NexTstep interface. I use wmaker without most of the rest of the GNUstep tools (I find them kind of funky and cumbersome), but the window manager itself is simple, straightforward, and rocks.
It's also very similar under the hood to Aqua as used now in OS X, which for the most part just skins it differently and removes a bunch of features I like -- so while I love wmaker, I really can't function on Macs.
As for userbase. Yeah. I'm aware that I'm in the minority. I'm totally OK with that.
The only thing that's not happening is a whole lot of development. And I'm actually totally OK with that.
BTW, putting off window manager/desktop environment philosophy arguments, Input Method Engine is one of those constantly neglected aspects that really matter for East Asian users. It seems that the ones making plans for WM/DE and other infrastructure had little overlap with users, and their designing decisions were very likely to omit the requirements necessary to cooperate with IMEs.
I'm not enough of a dev to know what would be required, but pitching this to the developer(s) might be helpful.
I'm using it now... I think my search is over :)
Thank you!
Bonus: If you're an Emacs user the interface/keyboard shortcuts should make you feel at home (or so I've heard).
I've set a reminder to switch to StumpWM 2 days from now.
Emacs is something I've never tried though Lisp is amazing and that's reason enough to use it.
So many fun toys, so little time...
Before that, I used XFCE. I have realized there is always another level of minimalism down from where you were before in Linux, until you hit the Linux console. But I love StumpWM. They might say it is not minimalist, but it is for me and it rocks my world.
I am going to hit submit and then hit a shortcut to open running term emulator and find my running mutt instance in tmux. Later full DE users.
Also see this comparison of tiling WMs: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Comparison_of_Tiling_Wi...
Update: I lied. i3 looked too good to wait for so I tried it, and it feels a lot more natural. I'm quite certain this will be it!
IMHO I've used buggy software that happens to be written in Vala, but I wouldn't say it is because of the language.