I never thought about it like that, but it makes sense in a lot of ways! PS Linux desktop has reached 5% I believe.
> I never thought about it like that, but it makes sense in a lot of ways!
Yeah. I developed Linux/open-source software for more than a decade, and the point was never to gain marketshare for Linux. The point was to develop good software that people would want to use. I don't care what software other people use, so long as it doesn't impact what software I can use. We would occasionally get suggestions from particularly enthusiastic users to make the experience worse(!) for Windows users, because it would promote the Linux experience. Just completely missing the point.
It would be to have them sitting in a room, in front of a Linux laptop with a perfectly usable userland utility and expecting them to not reinvent the wheel. The door would be unlocked and the developer would be free to leave at any time.
Linux on the desktop feels about the same as Mac OS X back in the early 2000's. It hasn't quite taken off yet, but it's past the point where you can be a user and generally expect things to work well. Overall, I'm very happy with where Linux on the desktop is these days.
Pre-mobile, pre-'fast internet', there wasn't really a home in Linux land for paid-for apps, there were a few, but not many. And devs flocked to Windows, and to a lesser extent Macs.
Fortunately, in 2025, people are developing software as a service, and that can be successfully achieved using Linux as your buyers aren't other Linux users. Paid-for (native/desktop) apps are still a rarity and probably will continue to be.
Most of the software used in my field (industrial automation) is commercial. Our engineers use AutoCAD. I use Control Expert, Kepware, and Aveva System Platform. Our techs use software that's specifically designed to interface with field equipment, such as flow computers, VFDs, and valve actuators. There are no real alternatives to these; we'd use them regardless of what OS they run on. They're all Windows-only because all the other industrial software is Windows-only. It's a massive chicken-and-egg problem.
(And before someone brings up FreeCAD and the like - no, those aren't real alternatives for an existing engineering company. We have lots of stuff we've developed for the tools we have. We're locked in.)
Personally I still use MATE :)
I used to like Mate and moved to Cinnamon but lately I just use XFCE and call it a day.
You are the second person I see adding this qualifier. In other words, it isn't all that great until modified.
I get that you are also referencing other overall design paradigm. But the fact that such a, to so many people, essential piece is missing after so many years is just a bit odd to me.
Granted, Gnome has improved over the years but there was a lot more missing that took a long time to get fixed and there is still a bunch of stuff that I think is user hostile. It is one thing to be opinionated about UI and UX, it is a whole other thing to look like you are actively fighting large parts of your user base.
If we are talking about historical examples (since then mostly "fixed"):
- No Minimize or Maximize Buttons out of the box. Early Gnome 3 versions only had a close button. To get the minimize and maximize buttons back, you had to use the third party Gnome tweak tool. Apparantly we all needed to get on the tiling or workspaces train.
- No option for a visible taskbar of any kind. Not even a clear dock with running applications, you had to actively enter the activies overview to switch windows.
- No ability to place icons on the desktop, at all. No files, no shortcuts. It was just there to have a pretty background.
- Dropping support for any sort of system tray (notifications area) leaving no place for background apps like messaging clients, sync tools, etc.
- The "where heck is my power off button?!" enigma, the system menu didn't have a power off button unless you knew to old the alt key.
Then if we are talking about stuff that I think is still broken:
- The hate for visible menus where every gnome app has a hamburger menu that is impossible to turn off in the native Gnome apps and as far as I know also doesn't really have a work around.
- While great for customizing things, the fact that extensions are seen as essential is also problematic to me. Extensions can, and will, break with newer Gnome versions. This in turn leads to a less stable experience.
- Nautilus is just a poor mans file manager as far as I am concerned.
If I could help it I wouldn't use Gnome. But I can't escape it entirely due to work related shenigans.
Despite my love for Gnome (and preference for over all others), there have definitely been frustrations over the years at design decisions and developer attitudes (lots of "I know better" and "you're using it wrong" which sometimes has it's place and within reason can be healthy, but in many cases I think was uncalled for). Still though, I think what the Gnome team has built is incredible
I spent a happy hour drawing 'workflow diagrams' based on my interactions with the UI doing ordinary stuff. As might be expected most of the time I was in the 'desktop view' i.e. interacting with windows in one or more spaces. Only a small % of time was spent in either of the overviews (activities and applications, now relegated to an icon on the Dash).
Can you isolate what it is about Gnome 3/4 that you like more than (say) a traditional bottom bar DE like xfce?
(+)Looking at Endless OS. They use Gnome DE but with some modifications that I was trying to pin down the logic of. Main one is a persistent Dash that auto-hides.
Yeah, the desktop roller coaster is fun for a year or two, but eventually you get tired of constantly being jerked around for no reason so you switch to XFCE and everything just works and stays the same for decades. The PC desktop is a solved problem, and XFCE is the solution.
I moved to XFCE soon after and it's great. I found a random plugin with last commit 7 years ago and it works Just Fine today. I set up my desktop 3y ago and it works the exact same way today. I know all the screens I use by heart. It's great.
Although I must say, I'm a sucker for animations and background blur and wobbly windows especially. Loved KDE for that.
I wish I could have XFCE's stability + animations. Ah well.
We lost so much functionality in the gnome 3 transition, and they didn’t even succeed at touch.
Browser based video players work well with touch so the hardware is fine.
It definitely did feel like they were getting ready for mobile/tablets when they designed and released Gnome 3, but I felt they did (and do) a great job at making a fantastic desktop and mobile interface. I was a vocal advocate at the time basically saying, "Yes let's consider how it will work on mobile, but we can't compromise the desktop experience in pursuit of it." I do think they went a little too far on minimalism (for example, the lack of system tray to this day still irks me, and although I don't like to install extensions, that one is a must), but they did make a beautiful desktop that functioned very well for desktop/laptop use. The keyboard-driven nature makes it a joy for me, and the toolbar and hot corner make it very usable for a mouse-driven user. Even plain Gnome 3 is plenty usable, and among non-technical family members who I've installed Linux for, they generally love it and it's simplicity. For more power users, extensions are a thing (though I would agree the dev landscape for them is awful and it's in part because of the Gnome team's decisions).
I would love to see them build in a system tray, and try to make the APIs more stable from release to release so extensions aren't on a constant treadmill of breakage.
Recently the list shrank, but many problems still exist. https://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.t...
Linux is Not Necessarily an Operating System -> no but we have distros that are.
QA/QC, Bugs and Regressions
Lack of General Software and Games -> just has different software, and de have wine/proton but fair ms office and adobe comes to mind.
Poor File and Folder Sharing Situation on the Local Network -> really not an issue, we have smb ftp ntfs... But maybe a skillissue.
Lack of Funding - > not really, ms for example funds a lot og linux dev.
Hardware Support and Compatibility -> At least better than MacOS
.... On the Windows side of things, you can run into situations where you have really old specialized devices where the manufacturer is long gone, so the driver downloads don't exist anymore.
I have been mucking around with Windows lately, and two things that caught me off-guard was the difference in file sharing and remote desktop between the two platforms. Unix and, by extension, Linux grew up in networked environments. I was really expecting it to be better than Windows.
Consider NFS. It's plenty fast, in the blows the socks off of SMB sense. It mounts as a regular file system, so it gets along with every Unix application. Is it appropriate outside of a local network? Nope. About the only way access control will work properly is to centralize account management, either on a server or by manually matching up the UID/GID on each system. Not only is that more work, but I really have to wonder about the security implications of that. Samba is also a pain to setup on Linux, at least if you're not running one of the big desktop environments. Protocols like FTP aren't really meant for file or folder sharing. I suppose you can wrap them up as a FUSE file system. Otherwise you aren't going to be accessing files from applications remotely, unless they built in support for those protocols.
The thing that really blew my mind though was Remote Desktop. Click a checkbox to enable it on Windows (Professional), select any users who you want to have access, head over to another computer, and log in with your account. Video works. Audio works. It isn't doing anything funky, like VNC, where the gate-keeping is managed by a single password.
Don't get me wrong. I'm firmly in the camp that most of the weaknesses (and lack of strengths) that people see in either Linux or Windows is mostly about familiarity. Having used Linux almost exclusively for a quarter century, I can certainly attest to that. I can count the strengths of Windows on the fingers of one hand (IMHO) and using it is a battle to maintain my sanity.
I also don't see a lot of the issues people cite, such as local file sharing (or remote desktop), as being something that affects most users. For personal use, most people have shifted to online services. For large institutions, there are professionals to manage the quirks of either operating system. That pretty much leaves small businesses and enthusiasts. Other issues are truly issues, but they are impossible to resolve without throwing away the advantages of Linux (like the claims of there being too many distributions).
For remote access I think ssh -X works? Not sure it will work with Wayland, but I am not a fan of that anyways.
`ssh -X` will work for some X applications. Heck, if you're connections are between two computers on a LAN and you don't care much about security, you can just make sure `DISPLAY` is set and open up X with "xhosts +". Tunnelling through `ssh` is useful when you're going across a public network, trying to get into a private network (heck, I've used ssh tunnelling for Remote Desktop between Windows machines in this case), or need a secure connection for any number of other reasons. A couple of caveats though, not all X applications will work this way and you have to redirect audio yourself. This would actually be my preferred approach since it involves displaying an application remotely, rather than an entire session. That said, there are too many caveats these days. Thirty years ago though, it was great!
Yes, this was a primary reason[1].
You won't get this landscape of diversity and customization if you just iterated on GNOME 2.
The GNOME developers have signaled over and over again that they're unwilling to provide stable APIs for UI customization. Being a developer myself, I can see why it's a burden, but the current situation is that it's being done anyway through unofficial extensions and users are left to deal with the random breakage.
Signed, former contributor to Gktmm during the GNOME 1.0 days.
I consider KDE even more polished than the MacOS and Windows desktops.
It's still, to this day, full of growing-pains-bugs, so every time a die from a thousand papercuts. I use NVIDIA+Wayland though and a lot of issues stem from that. Still, GNOME behaves better for me
As a side note, getting to wobbly windows has become a milestone of a Gentoo installation for me now - GPU driver has to be functioning for compositing, so by that point the system is largely functional. Feels like a rewarding treat at the end - it's a trivial graphical task on any modern hardware but it still feels like a fun flex after growing up with Pentium 4-esque workstations that couldn't handle KDE at all.
When AI gets to a point where I can just have it fork Gnome and make the changes I want to it without a large effort from me, it will be a momentous occasion :-)
What sucks in Windows is that you have multiple layers of old configuration editors none of which allow you to configure everything, want to change Network settings? There are literally 10 different places to do that and some haven't changed since Windows 98.
MacOS has this things where stuff you should be able to configure isn't or at least you can't rely on it being configurable next time. Just running a binary can be a challenge of remembering which obscure key you need to hold down so your OS treats you like a big boy. Every software update removes icons from my dock and I have to pray my audio interface still works (or roll back, which is a pain in the..)
The thing Windows and MacOS got going for them is that there is a lot more softeare for them, but since the enshittification-wave you can't really trust that something that works today, will work in a year.
KDE Plasma on the other hand just gets better, everything is configurable, the network settings alone put any other OS to shame easily. All the rest just seems to work, the desktop environment never once got into my way and when it did I could change it into not doing that ever again.
If Microsoft would care they have all the penguin tools,
https://github.com/microsoft/azurelinux
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure-sphere/product-overv...
Why does the toolbar need giant copy/paste buttons? Is any terminal user actually clicking buttons to copy and paste? The vertical space those buttons take up is enough room for at least 2 more lines of actual terminal output, which is important.
The UI is just such a mess.
For your complaint, have you thought about the fact that those buttons are very useful when running in a virtualized environment (which many people, including me, frequently do)? It saves you from having to fiddle around with matching the key combinations for copy/paste you are used to on your host.
Plus, using KDE in general does not mean you have to use all it's apps. I personally use Tilix instead of Konsole most times. Just like most would probably prefer to use Firefox or some other browser instead of Konqueror.
You mean fixing bugs ? No way. It is boring as hell. /s
KDE took a different approach, balancing power user needs vs. average user needs. That's where I wound up after I reached the point where maintaining a 2,000 line .fvwmrc was no longer appealing.
My conclusion was that there is no "one-size-fits-all" desktop. Fortunately a good chunk of formerly duplicated functionality has been moved outside of GNOME and KDE so I barely notice when I'm running a GNOME program on KDE these days.
Started with part 1, so far it seems interesting.
Part 1, 5 points, 4 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44593958
Part 2, 36 points, 9 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42435282
Part 3, 35 points, 12 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43320364
For me it generally lines up with what it felt like was going on with those projects, aka "5 mediocres in a trenchcoat will never add up to a Steve Jobs, but lets go ahead and try and beat Apple at their own game."
Count me in with those who think Ubuntu missed the boat badly by not stepping in strongly when Windows XP reached end of life, like "We're your boring desktop now!"
huh I never thought about this but makes perfect sense. Sad times
Mostly agree, except one Unity feature that never came back in any other DE. What Canonical called the "HUD" - being able to search through application menus, like you can on macOS from the help menu (and now from spotlight on macOS 26).
Instead everyone (Except KDE) decided to go backwards in terms of desktop UI design, and started shoving everything into stupid hamburger menus trying to look like Android because "Convergence" was the big buzz word of the time, and everyone (including Microsoft) thought we'd all just start using one device - a phone/tablet/PC hybrid device.
Unfortunately, KDE was also going through its transition to KDE 4 at this time which eventually did get much better but it was rough going for a while.
This was the time period that I moved to OS X, and have been on mac ever since. Ironically Apple is now going down the same road of missteps that the Linux DEs did back then, and would have pushed me back to linux by now if I could just get a laptop on par with the apple silicon macbooks.
Let's step back half a decade to the mid-2000s. Things were looking great for the Linux desktop. GNOME 2 and KDE 3 were well-received, though I do remember some grumblings about GNOME 2 "dumbing down" certain UI elements. Also, Windows was fumbling back then. Windows XP at the time was suffering from security issues, and Windows Vista was poorly received. There was always the allure of Mac OS X for those who wanted a Unix desktop but with a proprietary desktop environment (Aqua) and support for proprietary software packages such as Microsoft Office and the Adobe Creative Suite. Of course, switching to Mac OS X meant purchasing a Mac, which was a high barrier for many people. Given people's frustration with Windows at the time and the cost of buying a Mac, it seemed like the "the year of the Linux" desktop was just a few years away.
But then came GNOME 3, which was so controversial that it led to the development of MATE and Cinnamon. KDE 4 was also not well-received, leading to a fork of KDE 3 named Trinity. In the meanwhile, Microsoft released Windows 7, which was well-received and is considered one of the best versions of Windows of all time, alongside Windows 2000. Also, Apple released Mac OS X Snow Leopard, which many Mac users consider the pinnacle of Mac OS X.
I think the controversies surrounding GNOME 3 and KDE 4, combined with Microsoft's getting its act together for Windows 7 and the allure of Jobs-era Mac OS X releases, helped push back "the year of the Linux desktop."
Personally I wish Etoile (http://etoileos.com/), an experimental desktop built using the GNUstep (https://www.gnustep.org/) framework in the late 2000s and early 2010s, had taken off....it would have been really cool to have some type of alternate universe FOSS Mac OS X-like system.
They buy desktop computers like they buy microwave ovens: hardware + OS without any sense of distinction between the two. Then they decide what to cook in it (based on their own culinary interests).
There have been only a few opportunities in the history of desktop computing for a new user-facing OS to break through, usually at the emergence of a new user paradigm (i.e mobile), and those have all been captured by big brands like Apple, MS, and Google, using either complete vertical or tightly horizontal integration, and their offerings were mostly like microwave ovens.
Ironically, all 3 of those companies now offer "Linux" that you can run on top of their desktop OS's to use for software development, effectively making Linux an "app", no different than Photoshop. And that paradigm works pretty well.
It does work really well, almost too well. The conspiracy theorist in me wants to say that even though it's providing a useful feature, particularly for devs, it's all an anti-competitive practice to keep people from experiencing true computing freedom, going "See - you can have all your same Linux tools right from [macOS/Windows/ChromeOS/Android] - please stay on our proprietary and telemetry infested OS, don't free yourself.
OTOH, WSL was a godsend when I had to use Windows, and actually made Windows relatively pleasant to use outside of the recent copilot everywhere shenanigans. There's something nice about having an integrated Linux environment (or "app") within a polished desktop environment with access to all the big commercial software. It doesn't feel good to use, from an ideological standpoint, but damn if it isn't productive.
That's pretty much the history of all non-free software products, nothing specific to OS's. It turns out there isn't much of a market for computing freedom, but there is one for packaging up its innovations.
For example, I am a sys-admin, not only do I not mind managing my system via text console, I prefer it. It is fairly trivial to go off the deep end of "standard desktop environments" install one of them tiling window managers and have my perfect desktop, nothing overlaps, terminals for days, hot-keys to do anything, I never see my root window. No file-manager, it is almost the anti-desktop. I love it. But this amazing environment just does not exist in microsoft or apple land.
ChocolateGod•8h ago
GNOME is at least usable now due to a mix of performance improvements over the years and faster hardware, but it still eats RAM (my current session is running at 3.4GB RSS with just the AppIndicators extension).
But, I wonder had GNOME not gone this direction whether the Linux desktop wouldn't be so fragmented as it is now.
p_l•8h ago
But the seeds of what became GNOME 3 were sown in first 3 releases of GNOME 2, not in widely discussed but unrelated to actual decisions talks about patents.
rebeccaskinner•8h ago
Linux has always appealed to tinkerers and that was always going to lead to some amount of fragmentation. I don’t think it’s a bad thing necessarily. For all of the complaints about it, systemd has unified a lot of things that used to be handled through desktop environments and made things less fragmented as a whole.
ChocolateGod•7h ago
77pt77•5h ago
That's a really fringe window manager.
Not a desktop environment like the others.
spauldo•19m ago
I believe ratpoison is the granddaddy of today's tiling desktops, which have a decent following.
77pt77•17m ago
I know. I'm using i3 as I write, bit no desktop environment.
spauldo•8m ago
But I suppose it could go either way - ratpoison itself didn't have a very large user base, but it spawned a decent one if you count its successors.
bee_rider•8h ago
People want to customize their desktops. One way that could happen is through having some sort of grand super-flexible window manager than can do anything, and then customize their behavior in some configuration language. Another way is for interested folks to write their window managers in C or whatever language they want. The latter is usually more performant, and has less social coordination overhead, so it was the way things worked out.
I mean, we have Windows and Apple, with all the programmer-hours spent on their window managers, and they aren’t anywhere near as flexible as the open source ecosystem.