What killed the Linux desktop

This is the money quote: > The second dimension to the problem is that no two Linux distributions agreed on which core components the system should use. Linux on the desktop suffered from a lack of coherent, strategic vision, consistency and philosophy. Every engineer I know likes to do things a particular way. They also have a distorted view on the level of customization that people want and need. I like OSX. Out of the box it's fine. That's what…

I think it was the inability for GUI's to stay stable. Gnome went off the rails, Unity completely ruined Ubuntu[1], and KDE always felt very cheap and hard to navigate. My opinion, yes, but I always felt the GUI changes in Linux were extremely gratuitous after Gnome 2. Couple this with the fact that for a decade, the actual GUI was tied very, very heavily to the apps. So you had to use Gedit in Gnome, or whatever the KDE…

I've got an M1 Mac (mini) sometime ago. This is my first mac. What surprised me most is how buggy the OS is. I frequently see crashes of core system services (system settings, app store), night shift with "sunset to sunrise" doesn't work at all, on second boot spotlight search stopped finding any programs whatsoever without giving any error messages hinting what went wrong. And of course resizing windows, something that you don't really think about on Windows and Linux…

The Linux Desktop isn't dead, it just never had mass market appeal. There was a belief for a while that mass market appeal was required for the future of Linux on the desktop but over time it's become apparent that really isn't the case. The number of people working on the Linux desktop would be fairly constant whether it has mass market adoption or not and in many ways lots of those developers simply don't care about mass market adoption…