I couldn't disagree more. As a community, developers and Linux developers in particular need to stop believing in the divide between the Glourious Developer Master Race and Ignorant Users What Think Their CD Tray Is A Cup Holder.
Linux Desktop has been pandering to this imagined notion of an "average user" for decades and it still sucks.
Here's what needs to be done: make the system simple (not easy) enough that it can be reasoned about, something that someone can look at and comprehend and build a model of its functioning so they can conform how it functions to their needs without reading C source code and 40 different text-based file formats and out of date man pages. Stop being a Rube Goldberg machine of interconnected disparate components.
I'm impatient to be able to update my laptop for a X1 carbon and a speedy KDE.
I have an old MBP (the one that has all the ports you'd including a standard HDMI, don't know what year) and never upgraded beyond osx mavericks - it runs fine until today.
A friend told me they use new MBPs @work and they seem to break much too often. I also tried the keyboard on his working machine to find out how bad it is nowadays! I prefer the oldschool thinkpad keyboard but was surprised by the keyboard on the old MBP. The new one's on the other hand are just a tool for torturing users who like to write much.
iTerm2 was my favourite because of the features (like intuitive tmux usage without learning it's CLI-foo). I also like how it is integrated with the rest of the desktop (searching, copy&paste, url-clicking etc.) but can't really compare to the default terminal emulator as I haven't used it much after trying iTerm2 when it was recommended by the whole world.
It's been very good since like at least OSX 10.5 (when they added tabs) or so.
I always wonder why people use other terminals (but don't seem to use any of it's special features).
I'd be curious to see if you think it performs better.
This is happening. The web is becoming the de-facto desktop environment.
Take a trivial example of desktop application integration, which is with us since Windows 3.11 - common file and printing dialog. Nothing standard like that on the web. Most web applications won't let you even export the data in editable format.
UI - horrible. Desktops had standard menus and shortcuts since 1980s. In fact, many SPAs are trying to invent their own desktop.
I could go on.. the fragmentation of web apps is so much larger than fragmentation of desktop apps.
So a few weeks ago, I'm sitting in the waiting room at my doctor's offices. And they seem to be running late. And the waiting room is filling up. So I go to the receptionist's window, and ask what's up.
Turns out that their ISP was having problems. And they were totally dead in the water. They had no local backup. And knew nothing. No patient data. No schedule. Nothing.
So hey, I just left, and rescheduled. But damn.
A browser could run bare metal for what I care.
What do you do when the internet is crashed / your app is down?
I like the data-sync & backup part of web apps - you don't have to save etc. and your whole machine can just fall into a river but you still have your work. But I'd rather do this with a seperate solution and keep stuff on my PC so I can access it without a network.
By providing a minimal kernel for juggling browser instances, local file system and browser specific "native" APIs.
Welcome back to the timesharing days, just with prettier UIs.
It is however the pace how things are going, even most mobile apps are modern versions of those 2-tier apps during the 90s.
I prefer using apps with ncurses interface to many web apps. Also the standards are not good enough for my demands. I've worked in web development and I know how tedious it is to re-implement the wheel for each and every user (at least it feels that way) because you have to ensure everything is rendered and works on 10 different browsers (different versions of course because who want's to update?). Also you have the devices (I don't even want to think about that) etc...
It is nearly 2k19 and still centering stuff with CSS seems to be a huge deal. That's just not very assuring for me.
We'd need something more smoove and better over-all integration because there is still too many shortcomings and tiny bugs that could annoy a day-to-day user that doesn't want to know anything about config files or extended menus with special settings. It should be a great thing out of the box with sane defaults. That includes the icon set as well as a decent file browser and terminal emulator experience (iTerm2 on mac is THE REFERENCE here, I wouldn't want anything less).
Next comes workflows like office /graphics /audio stuff. I like how OSX handles PDFs etc and would love to see that on linux as well.
But I'm afraid this scattering is one of the biggest enemies of adoption and maturity of open source software. There is so many OSes and tools that you often have to research stuff for hours before you start off with a shitty tool that get's the job half done and then you recognize you can start from scratch because it doesn't work as you expected.
Instead many open source projects could live up to their potential if they'd combine efforts to merge the best they did and create ONE super awesome tool.
The reallity is that very often projects are just abandoned because adoption / donations etc. are too low or the 2 maintainers are tired after years of working on a project only 100 ppl on the globe are using.
Unite! At least converge to 2 big streams: Pro-Users (the ppl making jokes about shellscripts) and People (your mom)
Just focus on delivering for these 2 groups and I think most ppl would be glad about the end product. I for myself will try to do my best in putting efforts into projects I hope will have the biggest adoption.