There seems to be a lot of quasi-religious elements in the debate. Everybody thinks that one is well designed but can't strongly articulate why, and someone else believes the opposite to be true.

Linus has often pointed out the huge pain that the fragmentation of the ecosystem causes that is often uncritically identified as a choice.

Yes, converging towards standards is almost always a pain point for someone, but the ecosystem overall benefits from having much less ground to cover. And honestly, objectively almost any of the large mature DE's seems to be feature rich enough to use as a starting point.

I don't use linux at all anymore as a DE, but in a few jobs I did, using both (and for a while canonicals ill-fated WM), and the idea that gnome appears less flexible, slower, and just generally worse in almost all ways was usually (though not always) appeared to be the case.

Maybe KDE was a little too flexible for my tastes, but it sure worked better (most of the time - not always).

I also remember thinking - why the heck is gnome the default?

Haven't used linux as a DE for a few years now though, so no idea what the current status is...

Diversity has a value in stability of the ecosystem. Converge to a monoculture which brings highest short-term gains, and later it all can stagnate or even collapse for some single reason. See "banana monoculture".

It's not clear to me that consolidation here actually does reduce diversity in a meaningful sense of the term. Many choices in the Linux world are not so often choices between truly different things, but between superficially different spins on the same thing.

For example, many distros only really differ from their parent in theming, replicated but differently named applications and so forth, which could all be offered in one distribution with less workload, but the same degree of genuine choice.

Same is true for DE's I think. Many of the things that differentiates DE's could probably be offered as configuration within one DE, with less workload but no or very little reduction in diversity.

> Many of the things that differentiates DE's could probably be offered as configuration within one DE

If you want to get flamed to death, mention the word "configuration" on a Gnome mailing list.

There are people who think that things could just be configuration options, and then there are people who insist that the default configuration should be right, and that too much configuration is detrimental to the user experience (because it's hard/complex/time-consuming) and to development time (if you have two sets of two configuration options, that means you have four configuration to tests, and so on). It's not like these folks don't have a point, either.

> Same is true for DE's I think. Many of the things that differentiates DE's could probably be offered as configuration within one DE, with less workload but no or very little reduction in diversity.

Perhaps if this DE is KDE. Gnome devs aren't interested in a configurable DE.

Sorry, what's going to collapse if all Linux users have the same visual interface? Stagnate? Like a shell, you mean?

What if all Linux users have exclusively MySQL (imagine there's no SQLite, no PostgreSQL), and then it gets bought by Oracle?

Then the poster is wrong. They are very much all sort of the same.