> Sadly Microsoft is kinda forced to follow the trends, everything moves in all direction (web, phones).

Former Microsoftie here. While they are following trends, the actual impetus behind all the little changes you see all the time is that managers and ICs are incentivized to make "impactful" changes if they want good performance reviews. UI changes are a pretty easy way to have "impact". You can say something in your review like, "and X million users used the new taskbar that's in the middle of the screen".

This fucking reeks of Pressure to Publish in academia.

Except that publishing stupid papers does not harm millions of users, but yes.

It harms thousands of researchers who read them and base their further research upon.

The average paper only gets one citation.

If the average type of paper deviates over time, it doesn't matter whether the average number of citations is low - the type (direction) of research that gets cited shifts as well, and ultimately the direction of all research done shifts.

I don't understand how this scheme (in companies or academia) manages to emerge and sustain everywhere.. surely there's an answer but I don't know it.

I think the long and short of it is that systematically incentivizing anything is hard.

When organizations are small, you have the resources to evaluate performance on a case by case basis because everyone works with everyone else to some degree. When organizations grow and you have layers of bureaucracy, inevitably some asshole middle manager gives someone a bad review for a bullshit reason (jealousy, racism, dislike, etc).

That's when HR swoops in and starts making processes and standards for everything to shield the company from lawsuits. Crucially, these processes and standards don't necessarily prevent the problem, but just let the company's lawyers argue that they tried to prevent the problem.

Now that you have processes and standards for everything, employees start gaming the system. The goal is no longer "do the thing that makes the company succeed". The company is so big that relatively few individuals have the power to swing the company's fortunes one way or the other. Instead, the goal is now "maximize my career growth".

Then you end up in the nonsense FAANGM situation where individual little teams are putting out crap and making decisions that make the company look dumb. Things that would be easy to ignore if a significant fraction of teams weren't doing it. All because they're doing things that maximize their "impact".

This is hard to correct because you don't want to be too harsh with your teams and hurt morale, and it's not like it's every team. So you try to be flexible, be tolerant of missteps as long as people show improvement, because if you just fired everybody who made boneheaded decisions in the name of "impact", the hit to moral would cause terrible attrition problems. And worse, some of them would sue the company, which was the problem you were trying to avoid in the first place.

s/company/university/g as needed.

It's one of those classic situations where every individual step in the process does at least kind of make sense, but the end result is bonkers.

That's the problem with "impact", they're not asking for "positive impact", and they're not getting it.

You have your choice with Linux where you don't get a choice with proprietary OSes. If you build your desktop from parts you get to keep it as long as you like. I used the same desktop, mostly unchanged for 15 years on Linux without problem. It was basic, Openbox, gkrellm (later conky), xbindkeys, etc. Never had to worry about it changing as Openbox was basically done and the other parts were mostly done as well. Only had to mess with it when I wanted to.

Linux (and FLOSS in general) gives you the choice to have it the way you want it.

Not in these days of systemd and tight integration between everything. Want to fork your window manager? Well you'd better keep it up to date with the graphics server, which needs to stay up to date with the device manager, which needs to stay up to date with the kernel, which needs to stay up to date with... you've pretty much got to either fork the whole OS or live with whatever the big contributors are doing.

Systemd is actually a great tool for building your own desktop. It's user services/units are perfect for long running user process. I use it extensively for my Openbox setup. Running compton, conky, redshift, xbindkeys, urxvtd daemon, setting the wallpaper, running the screenlock program, and my calendar reminder all as systemd services.

The only thing really changing right now is Wayland and the switch from window manager to compositors and the related support software. There are getting to be a decent amount of options in that regard with a good crop of lightweight compositors and tools starting to mature.

is it true ? if XFCE decides to do things I don't like I may not be able to manage a fork

XFCE is a integrated desktop. You are choosing the desktop and what comes with it, including how the developers decide to change it. If you want control start with a window manager or a window manager like compositor for wayland and build your desktop from there. There are non-desktop versions of pretty much everything you need (notification daemons, keybinding, etc.).

https://www.trinitydesktop.org/ is an example of the community maintaining a continuation of KDE 3.

It only depends on motivation and time dedication. Anyone can be a developer.

Also if you go past the 3 main desktops there are many many window managers, standalone launchers, panels from which you can pick up the pieces you want to build something you like.

The first thing I do with a Linux install is uninstall X windows.

I remember being excited when I saw the first beta test of KDE but it seemed each version got a little bit worse after that and that's been the trajectory of the Linux desktop since 1995 or so.

I don't mind X, but I push i3 or xfce and nothing more. I tried bare console linux but there were too many keyboard mapping fu and a few web browsing facility I didn't bother to lose.

How do you surf the web or use GUI programs?

I don't. I surf the web and use GUI programs on Windows or Mac OS. I have a Linux server that runs Jellyfin and my IoT devices.

awk, grep, tail, nginx and all that kind of stuff is fine.

(I tried taking the 1050 card from my media server I used for AI training long ago and put it in another cheap Linux box and put SteamOS on it. They claim it can run Windows games but it won't run anything out of my steam account including the games that the proton database claims works. That's the kind of brokenness as the expected condition that is endemic to the Linux GUI)

If I found a GUI app worked on Linux I'd be so surprised I'd have to file a feature report with their feature tracker.

No offense intended but it sounds like you don't know what you're doing.

Xorg has worked for decades, a multitude of window managers and desktop environments have been perfectly usable for decades, and a couple of million people (going by Steam HW survey results) seem to be able to run games via proton perfectly fine.

Do you realize that even if the marketshare for desktop linux is minimal, let's assume 0.5%, those are still millions of computers working using what you claim doesn't work under any condition?

Good take ! Reminds me of that saying. "If one person tells you, you have tail ignore it, if many ppl tell you, you have a tail... look behind you" :P

Did you enable Proton in Steam? It's not turned on by default, though I believe that at this point they probably should. It's handled everything I've wanted to run on it.

Yeah, by default Steam only runs games that are made for Linux, you need to enable Proton to open up support for Windows games and use the ProtonDB to figure out the overall support for those games. Alot work flawlessly, some have known issues, and some flatout wont work, usually because of some anti-cheat software.

I think at this stage in the game, if you can't use a linux desktop but consider yourself to be 'in tech' in any way, the problem is probably you.

Doesn't mean you have to think it's perfect, doesn't mean you have to use it for everything, but 'can't use any GUI app on linux' is definitely a you problem.

Asking for a friend: "Is text-p0rn a thing ?"