Rocky Linux is, I would say, emphatically not a Linux distro for the desktop. This is unrelated to your rhetorical question, but I think your exasperation at "yet another OS" is a bit undeserved here.

This fills a specific need for "enterprise" customers, specifically, being very slow and very stable. It's not supposed to be a consumer OS for doing normal desktop activities on, although there's nothing stopping you from using it as such.

This isn't yet another slightly tweaked fork of Ubuntu or Arch Linux or some such, where maybe that attitude is more deserved.

To be honest I can feel you.

In terms of DE. More focus and hard work is on building something "cool" than something stable and less buggy. I would have been happy with Gnome if the base OS is stable. Yes KDE turned out to be better, but that was the least important of all cases. Lots of work hours have gone into making XFCE, LXQT, KDE, Gnome, Guix, Cinnamon, XFCE, Mate etc etc. The choice argument is futile if I or someone cannot be productive in it and spends time in linux forums. 100 Choices will never make open source more popular. You just need 1 damn good choice that "just works". Time and energy is precious.

As much as Windows is criticised, you will rarely have any issues with it in terms of hardware compatibility.

Coming to Rocky-Linux, this is server side offering. Plus its model is different to general desktop linux you use for day-to-day.

So tired of reading about people using hardware that isn’t supported by Linux and then acting surprised when it doesn’t work.

You never hear anyone install macOS on a Dell and wonder why it isn’t working.

So why are you doing this for Linux?

Lenovo, Dell, and other manufacturers ship products that are fully supported by Linux. Use those. If you don’t, you’re on your own.

Fortunately this is a server distro, and there definitely aren't enough of those around (stable trustworthy ones).

While your experiences with the desktop are unfortunate, on most common laptops (cheap and expensive ones) most Linux distros run well, even if some very specific devices have issues with the kernel drivers

Because of hardware manufacturers, closed/proprietary firmwares, Microsoft standards...

> Great, another Linux distro...

It is less a standalone distro and more a free version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

> Nouveau glitches.

Then why are you using it? As much work as people are putting into nouveau, they have to work more often than not against NVIDIA instead of with. If you want a system that works just use the proprietary driver.

> Why can't people just band together and create one good Linux distro for the desktop.

In this case? commercial interest, people used CentOS in production instead of buying Red Hat Enterprise. So the people in charge decided to make it useless for that. Now we have Rocky to do the same, just with people in charge that are not financially connected to Red Hat.

Difficult to say. I think there is a bad mix of talent, freedom, and pride.

You don't like my design choices? I'll leave the project and make my own. You end up with lots of talented people reinventing the same thing forever.

As many people can attest, popular Linux distributions (like Ubuntu or Fedora) work just fine on select hardware, like ThinkPad X series, or Dell XPS. But Linux on desktop is fundamentally a tinkerer's OS: great if you like tinkering and flexible when you need it but otherwise a waste of time for a lot of people :) I like tinkering and use Linux ~exclusively but don't recommend it to most of my friends.

This… is not the place to rant about Linux? Desktop compatibility is not the goal of CentOS style distros.

> Why can't people just band together and create one good Linux distro for the desktop.

Different users, different needs. Ubuntu and Archlinux definitely appeal to different people, for example.

One person might also use different distros depending on the intended use of a particular machine.

This distro is meant for servers, or maybe long term stable desktops you’d want in a classroom or something like that. People running servers don’t need any of the stuff you mentioned.

CentOS was free RHEL. RHEL is not intrinsically a "server" OS. I developed on a RHEL workstation at my previous job.

I'm not sure where the idea that CentOS is for servers came from.

I didn’t say you can’t use it on a desktop, just that it’s not really what it’s meant for. The issues outlined above, like sleep, Bluetooth, etc. aren’t the main things focused on.

I reject that that's not what it's meant for. It's meant to be stable and proven. The fact that makes it great for a server is irrelevant.

What does any of that have to do with an LTS server distribution?

The solution is not to have one distro for laptop linux, but to use the distro provided by the manufacturer for each.

Right, the one that is full of crap proprietary drivers and therefore cannot be upgraded freely to new versions of the kernel.

Yes, that's what they asked for.

I agree it is a problem. I think there are several reasons:

1. It's a mountain of work and loads of people involved are doing it in their limited spare time.

2. It's even more of a mountain of work because Linux developers have to write all the hardware drivers themselves too. On Windows drivers tend to be written by device manufacturers but that rarely happens on Linux because it's very difficult to write closed source drivers and they have fewer Linux users anyway.

3. A large proportion of Linux users and developers have drunk the Unix kool-aid and think that everything should stay exactly as it was in the 70s. Text based config files, services controlled by Bash scripts, etc. It's pretty much impossible to make a reliable modern system with Bluetooth, WiFi, external displays, hotplugging, etc. with that attitude.

4. Hardware makers only test on Windows so some of the bugs in stuff like suspend are probably hardware bugs that Windows happens not to trigger.

Text-based config files are one of the best features of Linux. Duplicating and managing Windows software configurations is a nightmare by comparison. Making a reliable modern Linux system is pretty easy; usually you don't need to do anything much beyond installing, but if you do, the solid reliable text config and service management files make it easier than any other OS I've used.

They're really not. They prevent you from doing things like automatically responding to config changes, or changing settings programmatically, e.g. from a GUI or installer.

1. How others prioritize their time and how limited it is is an interesting call to make. Are you familiar enough with any of the contributors to know how much "spare" time they have and how they use it?

2. See above.

3. I am locked to a Windows desktop for work, but support Centos servers for backups and such. What is wrong with text-based config files? Are GUI checkboxes a better option? They may be more discoverable, but seem to me to be less configurable. Have you read the Unix Haters Handbook? Unix's greatest flaw and greatest strength are its flexibility.

4. I can't speak much to this, but aren't some manufacturers testing on Linux?

> Are GUI checkboxes a better option?

Yes.