You want to use Gnome? Use Gnome. You want to use KDE? Use KDE. I3? ditto. Etc.
Oh, some random GTK app will look weird on KDE? Tough. Every Windows app looks different, and even MS's apps always felt out of place on their own OS. And with the proliferation of Electron apps, nothing ever looks "native" anymore.
> while I don't know if anything that has been built 2 Ubuntu LTS releases ago still works
Maybe, maybe not. But that's also an issue on MacOS. And while Windows prides itself on backwards compatibility (and mostly delivers), that doesn't come free.
There's also hardware backwards compatibility. Many devices that used to work with older versions of Windows or MacOS just don't work anymore. Even those that never required custom drivers from their manufacturer. On Linux, if it works once, it'll usually keep on working. I have such an issue: a PCIe USB 3 card, so it isn't even something that old. Used to work with MS Win 10 provided drivers, now (win 11) it's unusable.
To play devil's advocate:
What do those even mean and why should I care? I want to view my files and folders and click a shortcut to run a program and install steam. And I want that process to be stable and smooth and be both logically transparent and consistent.
There's too much I have to critically compare and understand in my life to want to add 'desktop GUI flavor' to the list.
You'll be able to view your files and folders and click a shortcut to run a program. And that process will be quite stable and smooth, I'd argue even more than on Windows, since you can actually find useful apps on the "store", as opposed to having to hunt on random websites.
If you want consistency, presumably over time, then yeah, you may not get that. But neither will you on Windows, who've changed the explorer in Windows 10 and now again in Windows 11. The explorer-like app that seems to have been the most stable is Finder. But then macOS changed in other ways...
It seems you can't really win at this, regardless of your OS of choice... So it think that's not fair to only throw Linux under the bus for this, while praising the others.
Dolphin has been basically the same for 16 years as far as I can tell/remember.
If you don't like configuration, you shouldn't care. Just pick any popular distro and use whatever's shipped by default.
As Kubuntu LTS users I don't feel that I am losing anything if someone else uses Arch with GNOME. Also there are distro made for children with custom DEs, distros for blind people, distros for media etc.
The diversity is not the problem, the problem might be some secondary side effects like some developer really wants to use some bleeding edge thing but he does not have an easy way to deploy it to more stable distros.
what's correct for you is not necesarily what's correct for me.
the problem with windows/mac is very much that it doesn't work the way i want it to work. why even have multiple oerating systems at all, if we don't need choice? we could all be using windows.
i don't see how removing choice solves anything at all.
Wait, I think that reminds me of a desktop environment.
You can have as much snark as you want. I specifically said that Linux should remain the platform of choice, just that the defaults should be stronger so that it's a more consistent and approachable platform for people.
GNOME has made great advancements in this regard, which has been awesome to see.
Agreed.
> GNOME has made great advancements in this regard, which has been awesome to see.
I wasn't joking or being hyperbolic in my previous post. GNOME may have good defaults in certain cases but it ends there. User choice and customization are seen as design defects and anti-features. They really do believe that there is a One True Font and One True Theme out there and anything else is unsupported.
Sane defaults shouldn't come at the cost of user choice. If they do, there's little reason to use Linux over a Mac because the former essentially becomes Android style "look but don't touch" open source.
And that would be completely fine were it not for parent posts which imply that GNOME should be the default and the only experience on the Linux desktop and everything else is irrelevant fragmentation. I respect users choice to use GNOME but I don't appreciate when people call everything else besides GNOME (or anything really) as fragmentation.
For example, here's one of the parent posts
> There is no reason there can’t be one agreed upon blessed way of doing things in Linux while still enabling users like you to have choice.
This is pretty oxymoronic.
To be ultra clear here: I'm not saying it has to be GNOME. I legitimately only said GNOME to toss you a bone when you responded with a needlessly sarcastic comment. ;P
It could be any DE, even a newly created one.
No part of your posts feels productive, and to be honest they feel like emotional backlash.
Like I said earlier,
> but I don't appreciate when people call everything else besides GNOME (or *anything really*) as fragmentation.
The idea of "one agreed upon blessed way of doing things" implies that a DE can be made to work for everyone, which is a false assumption. Just because Windows and Mac follow this philosophy, doesn't mean that it's right. Diversity and independence of thought isn't irrelevant fragmentation.
Did you use Win 10 ? One GUI in Teams, another in Office 365, a calculator which comes from outher space, 2 interfaces for configuration, disable microfon for admin account -> no microfone for user account.
People don't care that TikTok looks different than Instagram looks different than Gmail looks different than NYTimes.com looks different than a flight reservation site.
I think he even mentioned maybe gaming would save Linux from this, since games will not constantly update to fix compatibility issues so distros would be forced to behave.
There are way too many distros that are half baked trash that make it into bad listicles returned in search results.
The Linux community sabotages itself.
Stop trying to herd people? I didn't sign up for whatever agenda you're trying to advance, so of course I'm going to spit in your face when you try to tell me what to do.
I do not see a problem as long as there are a few good ones to choose from.
The people most capable of fixing the problem you describe are the people who like spending hours tinkering with their Linux UIs.
Besides, Windows usability is rubbish, there's a reason why the first thing that I, and, uh, a few other weirdos do on a new Windows install, is set up an orthodox file manager. [1]
That would give many distros much less of a reason to exist, and could instead be configuration profiles for GNOME, KDE, etc that could easily be loaded on -any- distro. It would also allow the configurations to be iterated on independent of distros which would eventually lead to much higher levels of polish.
It's not even right to compare Linux to Windows, or maybe even call Linux distros operating systems in a strong sense because they don't provide genuinely stable interfaces. People often remark on alleged benefits of open source software such as compatibility, yet it's Windows where I can click on a 20 year old executable and it runs, while I don't know if anything that has been built 2 Ubuntu LTS releases ago still works.
It's funny that one of the things that has actually driven Linux adoption is Proton. As one blogger a few months ago remarked, Win32 is basically the stable Linux userland ABI.
https://sporks.space/2022/02/27/win32-is-the-stable-linux-us...