Usability is all about design and consistency. Yes, code is needed to implement the design but code is not the primary focus of usability.
Asking open source developers for design and usability is kinda like asking a mechanic to create a car or a construction worker to create good architecture. They can produce something but it's probably not an inspired work of art.
Bottom line: The open source movement is a coding thing. There are too many open source developers and not enough open source designers. It takes both to produce good, consistent, usable software products.
Well he did have a point that we sort of fucked ourselves with KDE 4 and Gnome 3. There was even some instability in Enlightenment that let the Bodhi Linux people to fork.
Now we have a lot of DE forks and I think we don’t need them.
I still like Gnome, I like what Gnome 40 did. I wish I could get it on Ubuntu, I’m thinking about switching to Fedora just to get stock Gnome 40.
KDE look awesome for people who like that type of Desktop.
I tried Mate and XFCE and have a slight preference for XFCE. I would love it if the two could somehow combine efforts and maybe establish a real contender for a third desktop.
LXQT is done. It looks good for people who want something slim with a more classical windows like layout. I honestly think the Trinity Desktop people should probably just look at what they would miss from KDE 3 in LXQT and see if they can port those parts over and just join LXQT.
I would love it if Bodhi just got over itself and started working with mainline Enlightenment. Maybe Pop!_OS should do the same.
But other than that we still have Cinnamon, Pantheon and Deepin. All (if I remember correctly) build on or forked from Gnome and probably not going away. I think Pantheon and Deepin could probably work together on one DE separate from Gnome. Maybe Cinnamon could join Mate and XFCE?
I get it. KDE 3 to KDE 4 and Gnome 3 to Gnome 3 was a hard transition. But could we please get away from the idea that every freaking distro needs its own damn DE or one that is so customized it might as well be? We have to many desktops with to many distro specific customizations for no gain to the end users.
Recently saw this video on YouTube about the current state of some of the Linux desktop environments, which i actually found educational - the person talks about the history of the desktop environments, as well as some of the organizational woes of maintaining and evolving such projects.
Turns out the technical implementation of these environments isn't even half of the story, a lot of oftentimes unseen work goes into integrating them with distros, which can cause problems when the people behind the projects have differing views in regards to where they should go.
Now, i might not find all of what he says agreeable or even relevant to me (since i tend to just use XFCE), but maybe someone else would appreciate his take, or like to discuss this a bit more.
The title is about the Linux Desktop, something the average user would understand to mean "a computer meant for an individual user, as opposed by a server".
Then the video keeps talking about desktop environments, which are an optional and tiny part of what a desktop OS is all about. You don't even need a DE for GUIs (doing fine with a window manager, thank you very much)
Well Desktop Environments have become what the Linux Desktop is to most people and it honestly made sense back when we had just KDE and Gnome and maybe XFCE. But now we have so many damn Desktops that thinking about the good old day of just using a Window Manager (or now a Wayland Compositor) appears simple.
It sort of sucks that every distro thinks their shitty UI customization is their unique selling point, overwriting what ever Desktop Environment does. In the end the user is probably going to change it anyway or try (sudo apt install vanilla-gnome-desktop? WTF?).
When advanced distros like Manjaro and Arch get more popular because you don’t have to undo so much things are sort of bad.
Simple explanation: Having alternatives of alternative system components all competing with each other on top of creating multiple distros which brings inconsistency to the user and leaving app developers having to 'define' Linux support.
At best, you have numerous options that suit your needs, be it in regards to usability and visual preferences (GNOME, KDE, also RIP Unity) or maybe to have a nice desktop experience with limited hardware resources (LXDE, LXQt, XFCE).
At worst, you have a number of competing products that can end up somewhat subpar, as opposed to everyone focusing on one option, a la: https://xkcd.com/927/
Of course, who's to say which is better, since not having compositing desktop environments that fit within a few hundred MB of RAM would be as bad as all desktop environments looking extremely boring (at least when it comes to the average user, i believe that they deserve to have their eyecandy).
Asking open source developers for design and usability is kinda like asking a mechanic to create a car or a construction worker to create good architecture. They can produce something but it's probably not an inspired work of art.
Bottom line: The open source movement is a coding thing. There are too many open source developers and not enough open source designers. It takes both to produce good, consistent, usable software products.