Linux Desktop Kinda Stinks. How Did We Get Here?

There is a lot of drama right now in the Linux community involving various Linux desktops, including: GNOME, Budgie and Pop OS's Cosmic desktop. The Linux desktop was so good about 12 years ago. How did we get into the shape that we are in now? And why is the Linux desktop so fragmented right now?

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[billm.]

ATTENTION: The "G" in Gnome is SILENT! Thank you...

[Justin_Cider]

Linux will never be a mainstream OS until the millions of gamers worldwide, both young and old, smart and dumb can install a Linux Distro and install games and just play without doing some kind of witchcraft to get the game to work for 15 min before crashing.

[kazu]

As a newbie, I'm completely unaware of this DE lore and it really clears up how messed up the field is right now

[jcugnoni]

As a longtime Linux user, I think you nailed it with your analysis. Desktop environments are constantly shifting driven by the devs vision, but all the average user wants is one simple, reliable and consistent interface; not an alpha stage GUI experiment. The big challenge in Linux for the desktop is focusing enough attention of devs and contributor to bug fixes and small but critical improvements instead of new feature addition. Personnally, I rather use XFCE, Cinnamon or Mate, maybe Plasma but Gnome 3 is not the progress that we needed.

[YellowCable]

Makes sense, in the last sentence I'd replace "gnome has been holding Linux back on the desktop" with "distros have been holding Linux back on the desktop". Distros have failed three ways:

1) enormous waste of efforts and resources to reimplement the same things all over again, trying to "win" against each other.

2) The failure of freedesktop and Linux filesystem hierarchy standards etc in promoting a common layer of base libraries, tools and configurations between distros, so that an actual platform can be targeted by third party software vendors. See what steam has to do to run on all linux systems.

3) server focus vs desktop focus: desktop is simply neglected in favor of quick return from server and the precious cloud. Forgetting the application developers completely. Soon Windows + WSL will be in my view the best development environment to develop (server) applications for linux, so there will be even less incentive to develop the linux desktop

[pushqrdx]

BTW for people who don't know EFL is used by Samsung, rebranded as Tizen, pretty much all TVs and Smartwatches you buy from Samsung run EFL

[xinceras-]

"Clearly if there's one thing the Linux desktop needs, it's more forking. I mean why have 10 good distributions and DEs when you can have 10, 000 that are all shit? Where's the fun in having software that actually works?"

-Sincerely,

[bobdavelisafrank_]

I gotta say that KDE Plasma is *the* reason I got started with Linux a good few years back! It is still one of the most gorgeous desktop environments I've seen, and if I were to return to running a regular desktop rather than a tiling WM, it would be my top choice. Wayland hasn't made its way to the BSDs though.

[WaffleusRex]

As a relative Linux noob, I have to say KDE Plasma has been my favorite desktop environment so far. Have one laptop running Kubuntu and another with Manjaro KDE.

[stranded_mariner]

Linux's strength, unfortunately is also it's weakness, variety is good, but at the same time it's fragmented with too many directions and bickering.

[dumont]

I greatly appreciate the modern history of desktop environments as a new user. I have wondered, since switching to linux/gnu, why there are so many desktop environments. Personally, I love plasma.

[Razor]

The main thing lacking, is the ability to get things working and without ending up in CLI hell. Under windows, things are simple as automation and GUIs are core design principles. In nearly all cases, you can count on there being an exe file to install something. If CLI is needed, it is common to also have a batch file.

People can adapt to a desktop environment as long as it doesn't pull a windows 11 and waste a ton of screen space. What many users can't stand is when they need to get things working. They want system where instructions remain relevant for longer than a few months. For example, I have a laptop which has a weird Broadcom WiFi adapter with built in Bluetooth. The default driver gets wifi working but Bluetooth does not work. there are fixes for it but it is a 30 step process in CLI, it required edits using nano, all for it to fail and leave things broken because if you follow the instructions exactly, it will break things because it was designed for the previous version of Ubuntu from a few months ago.
While I could install the old version to have the instructions become relevant, then I will end up with audio issues that the newer Ubuntu fixed.

[DanijelTurina]

I left Linux desktop primarily because the Linux community routinely broke things out of boredom whenever they got them stable and working. Basically, since they're not in it for the money, they need other motivations, and when something is stable it's boring and nobody cares about it anymore. I, however, needed things to continue working, so them breaking them routinely became too much.

[josephdegarmo]

Cinnamon is one of the most underappreciated desktops right now. The Linux Mint team has done so well with it, yet no other distros embrace it as their default DE. Someone should make an Arch-based distro with Cinnamon as its default desktop.

[stanmlekodaj]

No mention of XFCE? Either way, when I first saw Gnome about 6 years ago, I wanted out immediately, then I discovered XFCE and KDE and I've been on Linux since.

[BrunodeSouzaLino]

What the Linux community don't seem to understand is that Windows and Mac users want an Operating System, not a project. The vast majority of distros out there are projects. Many people just want to get stuff done. They don't care about design philosophies, licensing politics, big evil corporation, grammar wars...And so on. This is also one of the main reasons why people still buy gaming consoles. Building a gamer PC is a project. A console is a plug and play experience for the most part.

[MaebhsUrbanity]

I've used xfce all my life, and it's served me well doing everything I need it to, though maybe KDE is worth considering.

[intotheshred]

Back in the Windows XP and Vista days Linux was genuinely way ahead and switching felt like a huge upgrade. You are spot on that Gnome 3 and KDE4 were huge steps backwards and Linux has never regained its lead ever again.

[EvanBoldt]

Completely agree on Gnome 3 being the beginning of the end. I actually liked Unity. Trying to add a global menu or system monitor extension to Gnome has shown how inflexible 3 is compared to 2.

[JayMaverick]

Finally someone said it out loud! As a Linux desktop hobbyist since about 2011 (and server use before that), I always thought there's something like this going on behind the Linux desktop development. But I always figured I'm just too noob to understand.