It looks great in screenshots, but the feeling is much inferior, a fact I lament.
I don't know what magic MacOS does under the hood, but no other linux distro I've EVER used comes close, with the possible exception of Gnome. Unfortunately Gnome is ugly as sin.
So much so that most developers using or targeting elementaryOS integrate their design really well.[2] For those that don't but still use GTK3, they also integrate quite well out of the box.
Sure, but since last time I've started KDE, I got a ton of segfaults errors coming from all over the place (and not just nepomuk)... Well, if the desktop is fine but the wifi interface or the notification tray is segfaulting, I'm just gonna throw the whole thing.
GNU/Linux doesn't have desktop stack capable of matching Objective-C, Swift frameworks both in feature set and related GUI tooling.
Do I like it when things are pretty? Sure.
Do I need them to be pretty to get shit done? No
I know that is what drove me away.
Most just want a window manager for xterms.
Designers get bashed because they don't know what people want.
Performance on GUIs gets bashed, because what matters is doing xterms over remote X connections.
Glances at 2nd and 3rd monitors
Well I can't argue there.
Not much in that department, either. Nothing that beats the proprietary software staples, especially for creatives, that I happen to use: no Cubase, Pro Tools, Photoshop, Premiere, etc. Lots of apps ranging from "close but no cigar" to "why even try?".
I care about CLI tools developed for macOS and Windows in mind, that take advantage of the respective OS APIs.
https://developer.apple.com/reference/
Not to mention the related GUI tooling.
Where is Instruments on QtCreator, for example.
The GNOME project itself [1] has a lot of projects which compete with what you linked. Sure, Apple has a few billion dollars to dump into development every year, so you have to adjust for scale.
Once upon a time, around 2000-2, I did some minor contributions to Gtkmm.
Qt alone exceeds the feature set, has more GUI tooling, and is multi-platform. That's just Qt, and the same could be said for GTK. I'm not slinging mud at Obj-c and the frameworks Apple maintains, but they are not unique snowflakes without equal.
https://developer.apple.com/reference/
I can find tons of entries without parity in Qt.
And their current trend to invent a different flavor of JavaScript every few releases, no thanks.
GTK+ is no competition for these APIs:
Because they don't care about stuff like GUI. And it shows.
I'm going to leave it there before the mist descends, but basically as far as I'm concerned Apple couldn't design a paper bag without fucking it up.
Where Linux sucked was in the distros' constant "improvement" of core features that weren't broken in order to be first past the post. For example PulseAudio was introduced before it actually worked with most hardware configurations, and nobody cared about the cool new features it came with. Ubuntu deciding to adopt KDE4 before it was ready for general release was another stupid decision. In fact, I'm basically talking about Ubuntu and Gnome.
Still use GNU/Linux on my travel netbook and of course, some of our servers run it. Last time I used Qt in anger was 5.3, while trying to do a mobile project that I eventually ported to pure native APIs.
Do you know of any other frameworks, besides those that cover all of these ones?
well... no. Speaking as long-time Linux user who tried all of this and in the end using i3 to avoid constant stream of bugs from DE.
Well... no. Ubuntu, Gnome, KDE, XFCE; they are all high quality desktops. Don't mix the desktop with the applications you're running on it.
> We'll have to endure multi-platform Electron stuff.
Now that is indeed a real issue, and yes, ugh.
Edit: I've misread the original, sorry, so adding a few things: if you're using the default apps or the ones built for that specific environment only, you're good to go with GTK3, QT, whatever. The trouble comes when you mix these, but that is true even for the MacOS. Personally I really dislike the approach of Chrome, not giving a s* how it _should_ look like to look at least a little native.