My take is the issue is really human-driven. In the Linux community, there’s this tendency to say, “This thing should be better,” and instead of working with others to resolve the issue, they just start a new project instead. The result? Time and attention are split across countless forks and alternatives, when they could have been collaborating to make something truly exceptional.

Think about how many man-years have been wasted trying to "fix" the same problems—whether it's the KDE vs. GNOME divide, the battle between package managers (RPM, DEB, Flatpak, Snap...), or the scattered efforts to create a mobile Linux OS. Imagine the impact if even half of that energy had been pooled into a single, shared vision.

It’s great to have choices, but at what point does “choice” turn into unnecessary fragmentation?

The problem is little to no funding. Programmers generally have to be paid to do the not fun parts of programming like fixing issue #74738547 “settings app labels have the last letter cut off when running on a high DPI display on a Tuesday when it is raining in Delhi, India but only on an even numbered year.”

UI development is an endless procession of nit picky long tail aesthetic and usability bugs.

Sounds about right. I'm working on a web UI for internal use right now and people will complain about some alignment being off by one pixel, clickable zones not being large enough, the interface being to compress/broken on a special Android phone with a tall display (this isn't even made for mobile).

The thing is that these issues are 100% real, I just don't really care to spend two days figuring out two labels don't align correctly, it's good enough.

Scaling this up to a desktop, then those small issues start to stack up. If you're then a Windows power user, then I can easily see Linux being a hard sell. I've seen plenty of people navigate Windows and Microsoft applications like they're some sort of wizard. I haven't tried KDE in a long time, nor have I given Cosmic a go, but if you don't just click around at a leisurely pace, then I have no trouble seeing that you could feel limited, compared to Windows.

Obviously I can see it opposite being true as well. I can't use Windows, something about the UI makes my hand cramp up (literally, there's something in the Windows UI that hurts my hand and wrist, it does not happen in macOS or anything Linux desktop I've used).

> The problem is little to no funding.

I honestly don't believe that to be the case. There's a big difference between commercial products like MacOS or Windows and Linux. That difference isn't so much funding (remember that Linux is backed by all major companies), but the fact that Linux itself is really just the kernel, whereas Windows and MacOS aim to be the whole package (with varying degrees of success).

There is simply no such thing as "Linux, the OS including desktop and UI". It's dozens of projects with different philosophies and goals. KDE differs from Gnome, Mate, or XFCE and those have a different approach to the desktop UI metaphor than say i3 or xmonad.

A standardized Linux Desktop experience would help with bundling resources as well as polish and fixing the "boring" stuff. But this would fly in the face of the "make-it-your-own"-approach that desktop Linux tends to take.

The constant dance between stability/maturity and bleeding edge is another big factor. The former allows for little annoyances to be ironed out, while the latter attracts more developers because that's the fun stuff to work on.

As a user you do have the choice to go for a stable, more conservative distro or play with the latest toys on rolling release distros. Specialized distros like SteamOS do quite well in their respective niche, though.

In summary, the Linux eco system is simply too diverse to point at a single issue like funding as the main reason for its perceived shortcomings on the Desktop side of things. The comment above pretty much nailed it - it's developed by Linux guys and their goal simply isn't to emulate Windows.

When I worked for Canonical, they made it a point not to have a reference corporate laptop precisely for that - we all ran different brands with different configurations (one of my colleagues had a late MIPS sub-laptop as his travel companion). The Japanese laptops were by far the most interesting and unique.

I picked an unimaginative Dell (my house was burglarized right before I started and I lost my then daily driver) because it had the shortest delivery time.