I think you need to open your mind a little bit and read: https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-9...
This is debatable but personally, 2009 Windows 7 UX/UI is still better than 2022 versions of GNOME, KDE, XFCE what-have-you in the Linux world. If anything, complete opposite of what you're saying is true. Linux UX/UI is let's just politely put it - OK.
but KDE is slightly better, at least in these aspects I care about, of course it looks disgusting, but you don't need third party tools to disable taskbar grouping and that's a big thing
A bunch of clicks to get to the Control Panel, but once there just a few to get to the GUI configuration dialogue box, and somewhere in that one or two more to enable "Windows Classic" style, and you had the good old W95/NT4/98/2K aesthetics back -- and all the functionality of W7. (And then you could spend a day or two getting colours and fonts and GUI-element sizes juuuust... so, if you wanted to.)
I clearly remember that when Windows introduced auto-snapping/auto-scaling windows, I looked and giggled as yet another KDE feature made its way to one of the "bigger" environments.
It's really well working in these days, but it was not like that until recently. I remember setting up Xorg.conf to get my single monitor working as it should.
Yes, Auto configuring X.org is older than that, but drivers, Multi monitor setup and other related things came later than that.
Even if X had proper support for multiple monitors, drivers were very finicky at the beginning.
While most of the work has vanished for single monitor setups around that time frame, multi-monitor setting wasn't very reliable and deterministic under xrandr came around and drivers added native support for that.
*: randr came around 2003: https://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/log/randr/randr.c?...
And I definitely touched xorg.conf a bunch of times even a few years later.
Allow me to show you this tiling window manager…
Saying this and also claiming revisionist history, this has got to be satire ?
Early 90s Linux desktop ? From what I can tell KDE/gnome started development in 97.
KDE started in 1996, but I remember running one of the first alphas in 1997 (Alpha 2?) and being relieved that Linux had finally something that somewhat resembled the Windows 95 UI. Before that people were primarily running tvm or fvwm (CDE was still closed-source), which was fine for Unix-heads, but nowhere close to the gold standard that the Windows 95, NT 4, or macOS classic were.
(Ps. fvwm95 was released pretty soon after Windows 95, but only had the look of Windows 95, not really the usability.)
Sorry, but talking about revisionist history. KDE had their first stable release in 1998, years after Windows 95. KDE was inspired by CDE, but almost equally by Windows 95 (see e.g. the launcher in early KDE versions). Before KDE, we were mostly using fvwm, twm, etc., which had extremely bad usability for non-expert users. The GNOME project was started after KDE, because some folks were unhappy that KDE used Qt, which didn't have a free software license at the time.
In fact, most ideas you see in MacOS these days can find their roots in early (and often experimental) Linux interfaces (from multiple desktops, to launchers, to Exposé).
Well, that's saying like "most ideas for the iPhone have their roots in...". Sure, there may have been environments that give some overview of applications. But Exposé set the gold standard for this feature and relied very heavily on GPU-accelerated compositing (Quartz compose). Something Linux desktop environments and Windows only got years later. Quickly after Exposé was added to Panther, you saw folks in the Linxu world trying to copy the feature to KDE and GNOME. See e.g.:
https://store.kde.org/p/1220207
(Also see how clunky and ugly it looked compared to OS X Exposé. Since the icons all have different resolutions, some are sharp, others are very pixely. The design is quite ugly, the Kopete window is cut in half. Etc.)
The Linux development has largely been reactive, even to this day. E.g. once hamburger menus started popping up in Google's design language, GNOME started to copy this idea. Thanks to which GNOME doesn't have application menus anymore (which is absolutely disastrous for desktops.)
most ideas you see in
I think this also expresses an issue with the Linux-approach to the desktop (by and large). In the end it is not about features, ideas, or being there first. It is about forming a consistent and coherent interface. Linux desktops fail here in even basic things that have been solved in other desktops for decades, such as consistent keyboard shortcuts between applications.
I am pretty sure it was the other way around.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_Compositor
Also, Exposé was introduced in 2003 before Linux counterparts (and requires a good compositor to do it well). In fact, there was a rush to write KDE/GNOME plugins after Panther was introduced. Sadly, most were pretty janky/bad until Compiz was introduced.
Spotlight (launcher/search) was introduced with Tiger in 2005, also much before Linux desktops started introducing it. Only after that, desktop search (e.g. Beagle) and search-based launchers like GNOME Do started showing up.
The idea that designers circa Win7 "ruined" windows UX/UI is just revisionist history. Windows has had pretty terrible UI/UX basically forever, and most Linux folks have known this since the early 90s, where KDE, GNOME, etc. were vastly superior to anything Microsoft was putting out. In fact, most ideas you see in MacOS these days can find their roots in early (and often experimental) Linux interfaces (from multiple desktops, to launchers, to Exposé).
The Windows design team was always terrible, and not to mention lazy[1]. Don't mean to throw shade on your ex-team, and I'm sure there's dozens of brilliant people working there, but the design has been an absolute dumpster fire for decades. And this comes from an almost exclusive Windows power user. (I just recently bought my first ever Mac laptop).
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/grhjuu/til_that_...