I think GNOME actually gets a lot right, perhaps even more than KDE for the average use case, but has a few high visibility misses and perhaps suffers from muddled focus by trying to also accommodate smartphones.

With a few key changes like bringing back the minimize button by default, integrating the dash-to-dock extension by default, and dropping the crusade against proper menubars it’d be easily the most well rounded and DE with the most usable out-of-the-box experience.

KDE shares the problem of muddled focus between desktop and mobile, but instead of lacking functionality instead has issues with its design feeling somewhat amateur, as well as bad defaults. KDE can be great if tuned extensively but without tuning it’s a mess.

I do agree that’s it’s good to have more players in the DE space, because no existing option has fully cracked it and more options is always good. It would be nice if more DEs shared work between each other (is it really necessary for there to be 3+ forks of Nautilus?) but oh well.

What I want to see most is a new UI library. Qt is nice from a technical perspective, but it being tied to C++ and thus lacking quality, up to date, idiomatic bindings for other languages really hurts it, as does its licensing shuffle. GTK is wonderfully flexible because it has bindings for almost every language ever, but comes with frequent breaking changes and forced GNOMEisms, and feels awkward outside of Linux. The ideal UI library would have GTK’s flexibility with QT’s technical strengths and platform adaptivity.

I always had dash to dock and all the other small common tweaks that everyone makes.

Until about a half year ago, when I decided to stay vanilla on a fresh install. After a week, I forgot why I needed all these tweaks.

I think the far majority people, myself included, can't even tell the difference in UX quality (as long as it is above a certain level) and will mostly like or dislike based on what they are used to.

I think you hit it spot on.

Personally I think if KDE had half the resources that were put into Gnome by various distros over the years, Linux desktop would be a solved problem.

So System76 is going to go NIH. Let's see how that goes.

> All existing DEs suck

I feel almost the opposite. I think Plasma and GNOME are both really good, and some others I haven't bothered to try yet because I'm pretty happy on Plasma (Budgie, Pantheon) seem thoughtfully designed and reasonably featureful. Plus there are good tiling WMs you can use on any of them!

I feel like there are more good options on Linux than anywhere else. macOS has designers galore and it falls flat on core window management functionality, like its stupid minimize/maximize behavior, lack of window snapping, lack of tiling, lack of click-anywhere resizing, and other DE basics, like configuring global keyboard shortcuts.

But I welcome System76's effort, too! I hope it's so good it makes me switch. :)

>partly because the one project with actual graphics designers (GNOME) wants to do something completely different than what most end users want.

We should learn our lessons and don't trust some designer that probably does not use the project to design good UX, a designer should use the project(app or webpage or DE heavily) before deciding ro remove some feature just because he read in a book that too much options can cause issue to some mythical average user.

It would still be less work to build on that foundations. Heck, System76 couldn't even bother to pony up the theming specification they were supposed to do for KDE and Gnome. Never happened.

If they don't even have the resources to work on the toolkit level, how do they expect to get the resources to work on a full desktop stack?

Bad call, imho. But hey - I think Rust is an excellent choice.

Their approach seems to be piecemeal, so I don't think there is a risk of empty promises here. My guess (based on following their dev comments for a few months) is that they are just going to replace the components most diverging from their desktop vision, until it's a new desktop environment.

I think GNOME's detractors are really vocal but the vast, vast majority of users are happy, or they'd be using KDE.

There is a lot of truth in this. If gnome really was unusable and critically broken, why is it the default on almost every distro.

GNOME is not the only criterion people use to choose a distribution. I choose my distributions based on package managers, hardware support, and stability. For package managers I only feel good with dpkg or pacman, which automatically eliminates a lot of other distros. Not all of the remainder has his hardware support, and out of that, not all of those have good stability (with updates, or software bugs). This means that for me, all that remains on the playing field are Arch Linux (because I'm more willing to tolerate it), and Ubuntu derivatives.

If the price of having to use e.g. Ubuntu is having to run Gnome, I'll pay it just to get the other benefits.

Most distros provide DE versions and yet the gnome one is more popular with all other factors the same.

Kubuntu is an official flavour of Ubuntu; you're not locked in by any means.

> All existing DEs suck, partly because programmers don't know how to design UI/UX, partly because the one project with actual graphics designers (GNOME) wants to do something completely different than what most end users want.

I guess that here we really need to figure out which end users we are talking about, to understand what they actually want.

To me, and perhaps some others, DEs like XFCE are pretty close to perfection - low resource usage, good performance, good usability, decent customization (as long as you don't want to do anything fancy, just get your windows to show up in a panel or two, and add a few widgets for resource display, clock, language switching etc.).

To users like me, the finer points of the DEs out there that have more fancy graphical elements or in depth customization, like KDE, are pretty much lost or are not really relevant. In my experience, most of the problems with the modern Linux desktop experience are created by the software, that has inconsistent element placements, varying button sizes, different UI frameworks altogether and so on. However, as long as the software works, i also don't find myself caring too much, even if things could be better.

I'm gonna go down in the flames here but Unity was great. It was very stable for one thing. I never had an issue that I do with literally every single other DE that exists. XFCE is stable but customization is a time consuming affair. KDE is riddled with bugs. Cinnamon doesn't get enough support and thus has issues with various software (recently like not being able to run Factorio via steam or having bloated font in KeepassXC), and GNOME is like a happy medium between KDE and XFCE. Unity just worked. Out of the box like Windows and MacOS. It made me sad cannonical decided to drop it. It was the first real dedicated support to a DE that Linux decidedly needed.

I agree, I loved unity and miss it.

Especially, there global menu and HUD support.

nah, Unity was great