Why is there no such thing as LTS for GUI interface paradigms? There should be an LTS interface version of every GUI.

Ubuntu won't change the GUI during LTS (5 years).

If by "LTS" you simply mean "more backwards compatible" well I agree and pray for the day.

I want to install SomeApp. My options are:

* `apt-get install someapp` and get v0.6.0.1abzrhotfix2 from 5 years ago

* Google to see if a third party repackaging repo exists, decide whether I trust the maintainer of that repo with root access to my machine, `apt-add-repo blah blah`, `apt-get update && apt-get install someapp`, hope that apt works and doesn't spit out a bunch of "Depends: blah blah but it is not going to be installed, you have held broken packages"

* Go to someapp.com, download someapp.deb if it exists

* Try to install it with the GUI, get an error, use dpkg -i instead, find out it has a bunch of dependencies, install them and hope they're abi compatible, also hope I don't get "Errors while processing:"

* Download source code, learn the flavour-of-the-month C++ build system, try to compile, fail, try to install dependencies, some fail because my distro only provides incompatible forked versions for political reasons, have to download the source for those too, have to either build statically or use LD_PRELOAD hacks

Meanwhile on other OSes, I can download the latest someapp.dmg/someapp.exe and a nice GUI guides me through installing it. It will probably work even if I have a rather old version of the OS, it almost certainly won't conflict with anything else I have installed, it will include everything it needs and handle updates in whatever way it thinks is most appropriate, and I definitely won't need to google any command line flags. And when I do upgrade my OS, I probably won't be forced to upgrade the app too if I've found a specific version that works exactly how I need it to.

I much prefer the repo system to the Windows "I wonder if I can trust this site to deliver a safe .exe, and which of the four 'download' buttons is the real one and not just a malicious ad?"

> it will include everything it needs and handle updates in whatever way it thinks is most appropriate,

Yes, because every application needs its own phone-home updater (with questionable security), with bonus "value-add" crapware popping up to remind me it exists.

Your first point is only applicable if you are downloading unknown, untrustworthy software from tophotfreeawesomedownloadsnow.com.

>and which of the four 'download' buttons is the real one and not just a malicious ad

I agree that this is a severe problem for non-technical users. For those users, there is a lot to be said for a walled-garden app store (which could take the form of a GUI apt wrapper, I suppose). More experienced users know what the link and download should look like, rendering those ads a mere annoyance. I doubt anyone reading hackernews has fallen for those things.

>Yes, because every application needs its own phone-home updater (with questionable security)

For what it's worth, I usually disable auto-updaters for any desktop app that isn't network-reliant. I manually update if I find a bug or want a new feature, knowing that I can always re-install the old version if I find the new one is worse. I appreciate that this has its own downsides (especially if the user doesn't keep themselves updated on security advisories), but the point is that I /can/ do this whereas it's pretty much impossible on desktop Linux. I would have to choose between several undesirable alternatives, as I detailed above.

>with bonus "value-add" crapware popping up to remind me it exists

I don't have this issue with software I use. If I noticed it, I would try the following steps in order:

* Block network, if the reminders are fetched from the web

* Disable any reminder features in the app's own settings menu

* Revert to an older version of the app which didn't do this

* Consider alternatives, of which there are probably several

Your first reaction is probably "none of that should be necessary and there is generally no crapware on desktop Linux", and this is true. But as soon as you try to use anything that isn't the version in your distro's repo, you are in for a world of painful incompatibilities and package manager hell. For every app you want to do this with.

You have /less/ freedom to set up the system how you want it than you do on Windows/OSX, because even though you technically /can/ install whatever you want, it is horribly time-consuming and aggravating to actually do so.

You can also use the Chocolatey package manager for Windows.

https://chocolatey.org/packages

On Windows I wind up using http://ninite.com/ for my "package manager" equivalent and hope the software I want is there.

openSUSE + Xfce is my go-to for installing a desktop system for a new Linux user. While openSUSE moves a couple things around relative to a typical Xfce installation, they tend to feel a bit more natural to Windows XP users (which, amazingly enough, still exist). Users can typically be relatively productive after some basic education to cover the day-to-day usage quirks ("use Writer instead of Word; use Firefox instead of Internet Explorer; etc.").

The only thing I significantly dislike about it for non-technical users is the scary warning that pops up if you drag a menu item to the desktop and try to run it; sure, it's easy to fix (click on "Mark Executable"), but that's still very unusual and unintuitive, and your average user doesn't know or care what "Mark Executable" means (they might know what "Launch Anyway and Don't Ask Me Again" means, though).

I used LXDE until they removed the tree panel in the file manager, many years ago. After having left KDE because another update that killed my workflow and reading that GNOME was not any better for this matter, it made me abandon Linux desktop completely, after two years of exclusive use.

I wonder if they brought the tree back, but... too late.