De-duplicating the desktops: Let's come together, right now

The tendency of Linux developers to reinvent wheels is no secret. It's not so much the elephant in the room, as the entire jet-propelled guided ark ship full of every known and unknown member of the Proboscidea from Ambelodon to Stegodon via deinotheres, elephants, mammoths and other mastodons. Indeed, Linux itself, and the …

[AndrueC]

What we need is another desktop that does everything for everyone.

[theOtherJT]

Came in here expecting to find this, but ready to post it if no one else had. It's what always happens.

[JoeCool]

That came to mind for me as well.

But it misrepresents the article's point. Liam didn't suggest that another project was the solution.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: That came to mind for me as well.

No, but it is (always) the solution we are going to!

[JoeCool]

Re: That came to mind for me as well.

Exactly!

Consistent with the attititudes that created this particular pit of despair, we will simply sharpen the same shovels and "dig harder"

[that one in the corner]

Don't need to exchange lots of rich, complex messages.

True.

But you know that they will.

Complexity just seems to be so damn addictive - even when people *try* to avoid falling for sunk costs and cramming in that library which "almost does what we need (and 317 other things besides), if we just add a plugin here; it'd be a shame not to".

Aren't we overdue for a revamping of DBUS?

[Julz]

Re: Don't need to exchange lots of rich, complex messages.

And that is just bad engineering.

[kmorwath]

Re: Don't need to exchange lots of rich, complex messages.

Under the hood, Windows 95 Explorer uses a lot of COM. I used to write articles on programmers magazines about how to expand the Explorer namespace - it's not just a file manager - and it required COM. COM is complex, but it can work with different languages, and allow compile time checks, and binary data are easier and faster to process. Exchanging tons oj XML/JSON/YAML/etc text fiels is a waste introduced by web developers who can't understand binary data.

"Linux philosophy" was OK in the 1970s, when you had punched cards (teletypes if you were lucky), slow disks, little RAM, applications chaining. They are the original sin of *nix, carried over blindly while computers changed, and especially UIX changed. And "text streams", one character at a time, are outdated. Dave Cutler was right about it. UI applications need a different design and mechanism than command-line applications.

Windows Explored doesn't do one thing only - it does several things - but all related to each other. What a software needs to be is "compact" - it has to cover its requirements and avoid to be a Jack of all trades and master of none, but it hasn't to be too limited, or it leads to the fragile piling of different pieces of software, each with different interfaces, of Linux applications (and which MS tried to replicate in PowerShell).

[FIA]

Re: Don't need to exchange lots of rich, complex messages.

[...] and binary data are easier and faster to process. Exchanging tons oj XML/JSON/YAML/etc text fiels is a waste introduced by web developers who can't understand binary data.

COM comes from the 90s. The extra overhead of serialisation/de-serialisation is negligible these days.

If you use a text based format you remove the problem of representation from encapsulation and transport (you're just sending utf-8 text), which allows you to have much richer object representations that are less rigid (You can ignore new fields if desired) and not constrained by the underlying binary format. (How do you represent a number, what byte order do you use, etc etc).

You also have a human readable format, which as the person who's often tasked with fixing obscure bugs in this kind of stuff, isn't an insignificant benefit in reality.

Unless you're at google or amazon levels of data the extra verbosity is probably offset by the advantages.

[kmorwath]

Re: Don't need to exchange lots of rich, complex messages.

"he extra overhead of serialisation/de-serialisation is negligible these days."

Computationally, maybe. But it can introduce husge bugs, and most of the time doesn't allow for compile time checks. The 1990s were far more advanved than the 2020 - *nix brougt IT back to the 1970s.

> much richer object representations that are less rigid

Sure, than you get deserialization RCE easily.... sometimes, code and data MUST be rigid to ensure safety and security.

> You also have a human readable format, which as the person who's often tasked with fixing obscure bugs

Stop using VI and use development tools common in the 1990s that allow to read and show binary data. Again, *nix brought IT back in the 1970s. OK, when you had teletypes anything had to be a string of characters. Those times are long gone but for those who awaked yesterday from their thirty years sleep like Rip Van Winkle.

> Unless you're at google or amazon levels of data the extra verbosity is probably offset by the advantages.

Sure, that's why HTTP changed with version 2 and 3....

[FIA]

Re: Don't need to exchange lots of rich, complex messages.

Computationally, maybe. But it can introduce husge bugs, and most of the time doesn't allow for compile time checks. The 1990s were far more advanved than the 2020 - *nix brougt IT back to the 1970s.

All code can have bugs.

Also, how do I compile time check code from a foreign source? Usually by generating a client from their human readable protocol specification I expect. (That's how I've done it for the last 20 years or so).

sometimes, code and data MUST be rigid to ensure safety and security.

Absolutely, but that has nothing to do with binary formats. There are many poorly specified and arbitrary binary formats out there as there are textual ones.

Stop using VI and use development tools common in the 1990s that allow to read and show binary data.

What format is that binary data in? Again... how do I cope with things like byte ordering differences? What do I represent a char as? (Much more common in the 90s than now admittedly).

> Unless you're at google or amazon levels of data the extra verbosity is probably offset by the advantages.

Sure, that's why HTTP changed with version 2 and 3....

I don't understand your point here? Google largely led the development of HTTP 2 with SPDY, for them saving a few bytes per transaction is worth millions of dollars.

[bazza]

Re: Don't need to exchange lots of rich, complex messages.

>If you use a text based format you remove the problem of representation from encapsulation and transport (you're just sending utf-8 text), which allows you to have much richer object representations that are less rigid (You can ignore new fields if desired) and not constrained by the underlying binary format. (How do you represent a number, what byte order do you use, etc etc).

There is nothing special about text representations that binary representations cannot match. Text is a binary representation, it's just a very inefficient one. Binary serialisation is a thing, and has been a thing for far longer than today's popular text serialisations (ASN.1's BER goes back to the 1980s I think). If you've not heard of it, it's because it comes from the ITU and ITU technologies are often shunned by the "software" world. However, the ITU has maintained and extended it, so it's bang up to date with things like XML and JSON wireformats.

If one is doing "interfacing" by writing code according to one's own interpretation of a text stream, that invites all manner of bugs. One can improve on that with an ICD, but to be honest the easiest solution is a proper schema describing in detail what is and what is not valid data on the interface. There's a few of these around. XML schemas can express what valid XML is for the application, including the important part of constraints (value constraints and length constraints). JSON schema can also define shape and constraints. Both are moderately successful, but do not begin to offer enough functionality for interfacing done properly (and are let down by poor tooling). Google Protocol Buffers does some of this - binary wireformat, schema language - but falls short by having no mechanism to define constraints, and having weird rules about what valid wireformat data is (e.g. ambiguous decodings of data, the best example being that a "oneof" does not in fact mean "only one of these can be validly sent"). Google had some peculiar design choices when they did GPB and threw away some of the advantages of a schema-driven code generation.

The granddaddy of them all is ASN.1, with its multiple wireformats (which include numerous binary representations for different purposes, as well as text representations like JSON and XML (several dialects)), its rich constraints, enforcement and extensibility features, as well as the ability for an ASN.1 schema to define values / instances of objects and not just object shape. There's reasons why the entire telephony (mobile and fixed line) machinery uses ASN.1. They really care about thoroughly defined and policed interfaces and no one wants to waste time implementing those interfaces or checks by hand, and nor do they want to waste expensive network bandwidth on bloaty data representations. You get the right tools (good ASN.1 code generators cost a bit of money), the schema, build it and *boom* your interfaces are done. I've wiped out months of system integration time from projects using it, and had a level of design agility that's really hard to get any other way.

>You also have a human readable format, which as the person who's often tasked with fixing obscure bugs in this kind of stuff, isn't an insignificant benefit in reality.

Having a human readable format is a useful debugging trait. But it's a mistake to turn that into, "therefore all data that is exchanged should be human readable", because that's the worst possible format for proper definition for a developer and interpretation of data by a machine. One of the nice things about ASN.1 is that one can freely translate between data representation - e.g. sending a compact binary represetation of an object via a constrained bandwidth link, whilst (for 1 line of code) sending a text version of the same object to logging. Even Google Protocol Buffers can do this to some extent (GPB objects can be rendered as JSON).

The problem with most serialisation technologies is that they're concrete - whatever it is you do to define the shape of an object (e.g. in an XML schema, or in source code class decoration) has a 1:1 mapping to what the object looks like in wireformat (XML). What really helps with system implementation is if the the serialation technology one uses is more "abstract", in that it does not define specifically how objects are represented, allowing for that representation to be flexed trivially throughout the system acccording to needs. The 'A' in ASN.1 is "abstract".

[shodanbo]

Re: Don't need to exchange lots of rich, complex messages.

Less rigid also means more brittle where a difference in capitalization or spelling/mispellling can break things.

My issue is with the fact that textual data exchange formats often involve trade offs where you give up compile time error checking for development speed and flexibility.

The problem is its very easy to exchange data without having actual compile time checkable contracts between systems (that in the past were a side effect of binary serialization). And at first its not much of a problem. But as systems get more complex and more humans get involved in the writing and maintenance of the systems the problem creeps up on you.

Its not that you cannot have compile time checking with textual data exchange formats OpenAPI can do it with textual contracts.

The problem is getting others to care about those contracts.

Unless you use something binary like gRPC where reverse engineering your binary data is painful enough to matter, it too easy to skip the compile step and just wing it and pay the price later.

[Anonymous Coward]

Elvis has left the building

And you are right, haven't seen Stevie for a while now.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Elvis has left the building

There are two reasons for all those vi clones:

1. Vi is a damn good text editor

2. It used some AT&T proprietary code so it couldn't be open-sourced in its original version

Because of those two factors there were a lot of people who wanted the vi goodness so, independently, decided to write their own clone. It wasn't a matter of people writing their own clone just for the sake of writing a vi clone, it was people writing a vi clone because it was the only way they could have the vi goodness.

Some were better than others. I remember - vaguely - having vi for either DOS or Windows which even came with its own terminfo which lived in \etc, of course.

The AT&T code was eventually freed so now there's no need for clones. Just use nvi.

[Bebu sa Ware]

Windows style WM ?

I have managed to get by with Openbox which doesn't have a task bar (although it might have—I haven't looked too hard) so probably not quite Windows style ?

The window rollup/down is far more usueful to me than iconizing to a taskbar.

The customisabe pop·up menus are far more intuitive the ever changing shemozzle of the Window start menu.

If it all gets too hard I'll have to settle for the OpenBSD cwm.

[percolate]

Re: Windows style WM ?

You might be interested in what Bunsen Labs has done with Openbox. Check it out and copy whatever they've used to theme it - it's gorgeous.

[Zolko]

Re: Windows style WM ?

Yes, this !

My KDE desktop doesn't look and behave like anything Win95 did :

It has no task bar (but an overall presentation when pushing the mouse into a corner) , no minimised windows (yes I roll them up too), 4 virtual desktops (windows still doesn't have those and I couldn't live without those) , a CDE-like floating Dock but on the left of the screen, a secondary panel for cpu and memory usage on top, window buttons are on the left like MacOS, selecting and then middle-button pastes into anything including terminal (no ctrl-c / ctrl-v) ....

Liam, this was quite a poor article

[Benegesserict Cumbersomberbatch]

Re: Windows style WM ?

KDE, as well as several of the other WMs mentioned, give the user the very flexibility needed to refute Liam's argument about same-old-same-old UIs, and then he proceeds to bemoan how many pre-built start menus it is prepared to offer. Is this is not exactly what he was longing for at the beginning of the article? What, exactly, is your point, Liam? Sure, a distro might come off the installation medium configured for familiarity (we don't want to scare off those new arrivals from Redmond now, do we?), but the capacity to reshape it to your liking is precisely what Windows lacks, that several different Linux WM providers offer.

On the subject of litigation-shy efforts like GNOME, it seems to me that every UI decision that might have been made has been compared to Micros~1 and then followed some obsessive compulsion to do it differently. The result is to me a confusing unfamiliar monstrosity. MS themselves were the subject of the famous Look and Feel lawsuit from Apple in which they argued common sense and won out over an attempt to monopolise UI interfaces.

[Zolko]

Re: Windows style WM ?

no minimised windows (...), 4 virtual desktops

come to think of it, this is a very different paradigm than Win95 : with virtual desktops you don't need minimized windows and you can't have a taskbar because there are too many windows. And virtual desktops come from CDE. So not only is this a poor article but it's actually a false one : modern *nix desktops don't derive from Win95 but from CDE (or whoever invented virtual desktops). Some default shipments might have a Win95 look – I wouldn't know because I recycle my setting at each new install – but that's only cosmetics.

[collinsl]

Re: Windows style WM ?

Win 10 has had virtual desktops the entire time (they're called task views instead but it's the same concept) and Win 11 has carried them forwards.

[Zolko]

Re: Windows style WM ?

1) may-be ... I just checked (I do have a Win11 laptop for work) and it doesn't show anything about "TaskView". Where is it hidden ? EDIT : there ARE multiple desktops, I've never noticed it because there is no "Pager" that shows them, it's a list of desktops. May-be they'll go all the way copying CDE and Win12 will have a proper desktop pager ?

2) KDE has virtual desktops AND "Activities ", which are different things

3) but whatever, the argument of this article is that it all comes from Win95 which didn't have anything approaching virtual desktops. That later Microsoft copied CDE (or KDE) and introduced some sort of multiple desktops doesn't save this article

[FIA]

Re: Windows style WM ?

Windows has had virtual desktops since at least NT 4.

Using them has become easier in the last few years though. XP's Powertoys included a utility to actually use them, but there were third party tools available before then.

[kmorwath]

Re: Windows style WM ?

Windows NT had the capability of creating many desktops but lacked some features to make them really usable. Sysinternals wrote an utility to use them, but their use had some limitations. Actually switching desktop is seen in UAC dialogs.

Most utilities simulated multipe desktop on a single one, hiding/showing windows as needed, not using the OS desktops.

Why Microsoft didn't make them available earlier I never understood, especially on single monitor sytems (maybe with small monitors too) they are more useful than with large multimonitor systems.

Maybe they were afraid user would start to lose windows around...

[vtcodger]

Re: Windows style WM ?

First of all, I've long thought there was nothing much wrong with the Windows 95 UI. It's simple, straightforward, and comprehensible to a wide variety of users including 6 year olds who are still unsure about the alphabet. It seems to me to have much the same relationship to computers that the Model-T Ford had to automotives or the DC3 to aeronautics. In point of fact, I think Microsoft might be well advised to return to it as their UI has become more and more complex and baffling as time has passed. In Windows 11 it seems finally to have reached the point of complete incomprehensibility. At least to me. Fortunately I don't have to use it.

On my own PC, I use Fluxbox which is, I believe, pretty much Openbox with a taskbar. The only drawback I can see is that it DOESN'T look much like Windows 95 or Windows anything and therefore, my family members have trouble if they have to use it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Always looking the wrong way at the wrong thing.

I tried to move a colleague to Linux Mint 15 years ago. He was the least techy person you could meet.

All went well - until they said "Where's mu Outlook ?"

By which they meant that thing that everyone+dog had on their windows machine that "did email" and "did calendars" in the same screen.

"Well", I said, "Here's Thunderbird and Evolution and they work together ... hang on, where are you going"

And that was that.

A microcosm of how the *nix mindset has studiously avoided actually looking at what the noddy user *wants*.

Yes, we all know that we can supply what they *need*. But they will never see that.

When I tried that I had been using Linux since Dapper Drake.

[AndrueC]

Re: Always looking the wrong way at the wrong thing.

A microcosm of how the *nix mindset has studiously avoided actually looking at what the noddy user *wants*.

Yup. Users want to just power on and do stuff.

Linux is just too damn technical, pretty much right from the start. This article is making exactly that point and it's barely scratched the surface. Android has succeeded because it's so locked down that it's pretty much recognisable and usable to everyone (despite various manufacturers trying to differentiate themselves through what amounts to skinning the UI).

Choice is great..from a technical point of view. But from a customer's point of view it's just irritating and esoteric nonsense.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Always looking the wrong way at the wrong thing.

What do you mean by "too damn technical"?

Anything that demands holding things up every month for a massive update requiring a reboot or two* and hangs itself up the rest of the time because the multiple anti-virus crapackages the PC vendor prei-installed are fighting each other it too technical for my liking. Especially when at least one of the crapackages keeps reinstalling itself after it had been supposedly removed.

And, when plugging in something as simple as a USB stick, it pops up a menu that witters on about installing drivers rather than just asking for permission to mount it and open it also seems unduly technical.

* That, of course, assumes that the update actually works and doesn't require low level command line stuff to shuffle about storage and a few other incantations to fix - or even a complete reinstall.

[Carnotaurus]

Re: Always looking the wrong way at the wrong thing.

Bullcrap.

You have obviously not used Windows in years and keep repeating the same myths that the Linux fans love to say. Windows has not required drivers for USB devices since XP. You can halt updates for a while so every month reboot is not needed. The antivirus thing is the vendors fault for putting them, not Microsoft.* And if a monthly update fails (extremely rare in my years) I just wait for the following month, and the next one will take care of it.

* -And don't give me the line that Windows gets viruses and Linux doesn't. Nowadays, hacker gocfor either vulnerabilities (which Linux also has) or trick less than savvy people to hand over financial information.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Always looking the wrong way at the wrong thing.

"Windows has not required drivers for USB devices since XP"

W11 on a friend's laptop, last week offered some wierd pop-up along those lines. I eventually fond the not too obvious option to open it. (It was also throwing up frequent reminders about wear or trimming of her SSD but I wasn't getting into that. All I wanted was the file of pseudo-random characters that's the admin password for a hosted Nextcloud so I could get her logged on.)

"And if a monthly update fails (extremely rare in my years) I just wait for the following month, and the next one will take care of it."

My no 2 laptop has Q10 on it. There was a notorious, AIRC from successive reports here, update that failed every month. Eventually I did a reinstall which was the only thing to fix it. There were all sorts of instructions online to download this, that or the other from MS, run the sort of commands that Windows boosters say is a problem with Linux and none of them worked. I think the only improvement from days of yore was that Windows could be reinstalled without trampling all over other partitions.

What other gems did this throw up? Ah, yes, I remember. Back in the day I'd made a restore image in the way they used to say to do before blowing away the original W10 to make it my no 1 laptop. When it was relegated I thought I'd restore it. After that, every time it was booted into Windows it complained that the OneDrive was incompatible with a DLL, or maybe the other way around, for a year or two. Not that I wanted OneDrive but it was just another thing that made it look like a bag of spanners.

[tiggity]

Re: Always looking the wrong way at the wrong thing.

@Carnotaurus (nice dino ref)

I have a win11 machine from my employer, updates controlled by them (& no admin access for my login) - I have zero control over updates so cannot "let them stack" - I thus have to do a lot of reboots as I cannot do them at my convenience but when an update is pushed to "my"* machine (bear in mind it's not just Win11 updates, its updates for various MS products we are mandated to use - & I imagine lots of people with Win11 for work reasons are also using other MS products (else what is the point of them running windows?))

* as I said, no admin rights so not really "my" machine as minimal control over it! Mine only that it is assigned to me, not a shared machine.

[LionelB]

Re: Always looking the wrong way at the wrong thing.

> Linux is just too damn technical, pretty much right from the start. This article is making exactly that point...

Um, no, it really isn't. It's about duplication of effort.

[graemep]

Re: Always looking the wrong way at the wrong thing.

That is really a matter of Linux not being preinstalled. If you buy a Linux machine with Linux preinstalled you can "power on and do stuff".

I recently bought my 17 year old daughter (not an IT geek - she has applied for archaeology degrees) a Windows laptop and she found the setup irritating, the need to have am MS account to login intrusive, and wants me to install Linux on it.

Choice is great..from a technical point of view. But from a customer's point of view it's just irritating and esoteric nonsense.

Well, that is it for the principles underlying free market economics then!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Always looking the wrong way at the wrong thing.

MS account isn’t required you can skip that bit, they do make you click 3 or 4 times saying yes I’m sure go away! The worst part is the constant attempt to sell MSO365 after every update!

The MS windows control and handling of multiple monitors is still my favourite so far, Mac OS still hasn’t caught up and the last Linux version I used did not respond quite as slickly.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Always looking the wrong way at the wrong thing.

"did not respond quite as slickly"

As slickly as what? As slickly as having to click multiple times to use W11 without a MS account?

[PRR]

Re: Always looking the wrong way at the wrong thing.

>>The MS windows control and handling of multiple monitors is still my favourite so far, Mac OS still hasn’t caught up and the last Linux version I used did not respond quite as slickly.

> "did not respond quite as slickly" As slickly as what? As slickly as having to click multiple times to use W11 without a MS account?

If I read the post correctly, this is in reference to "multiple monitors". MM is pretty consistent in Windows since Win98 or so. In Linux it seems to be random crapshoot.

[My other car WAS an IAV Stryker]

Re: Always looking the wrong way at the wrong thing.

My 13-year-old son is now using Linux Mint to learn Inkscape, with weekly lessons. Wake it up, let me put in a password, click the icon in the taskbar panel, use -- following along with the lesson on his iPad -- save, close, put to sleep until next Wednesday. As simple as it gets!

The machine is quite old and previously had Windows Vista. His older sister previously ran the same course using a Windows 8 laptop. It was newer hardware, but slower than this Mint setup thanks to Windows bloat.

My kids have used Windows before and (seem to) understand the Windows-like Cinnamon desktop just fine. If other kids can learn/hone basic computer skills on ANY OS that mimics Windows, it will translate well to using any other Windows-like OS in the workplace, including Windows itself. I don't see a problem inherent with Linux or the fact that the desktops are like Windows. (The author's point about desktop duplication is valid, though.)

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Always looking the wrong way at the wrong thing.

A microcosm of how the *nix mindset has studiously avoided actually looking at what the noddy user *wants*.

Give that TBird does both email and calendars on the one screen and more (it still does Usenet and RSS doesn't it?) this is hardly a a matter of not giving the noddy user what it wants, it's a matter of the noddy user being unable to see what's in front of their nose. You should have put an entry for it onto the menu and called it Outlook.

On the other hand if the UI is made to resemble whatever Microsoft are currently offering too closely we get Liam complaining they lack originality (it looks too much like W95) or, when I've suggested easing users into Linux by Windows-like KDE themes, commentards demanding why would one do that.

And, of course, I find my W11 using friends complaining about what MS are doing to Outlook.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Always looking the wrong way at the wrong thing.

What users want is for what they know, to work.

95% of the changes to UI do not actually confer enough gain to offset the cost of relearning.

[myhandler]

Re: Always looking the wrong way at the wrong thing.

Integrated calendar wasn't available in Tbird back when the OP's story was set.

It also took Mozilla several years to get it running reliably when it was finally integrated

[LionelB]

Re: Always looking the wrong way at the wrong thing.

> All went well - until they said "Where's mu Outlook ?"

To which the answer was "In your browser". Okay, it's broken, but not much worse than the official desktop version.

> A microcosm of how the *nix mindset has studiously avoided actually looking at what the noddy user *wants*.

It also seems to be a macrocosm of the Microsoft mindset since... ooh, about Win7, if not earlier. But the noddy user sucks it up from MS because that's all they know, so that's what they get.

(Also, not true - I've successfully shunted a few users - okay, mostly elderly relatives for whom I am de facto sysadmin - onto Mint/Xfce, without much pain¹.)

¹_{In truth, mostly because I can ssh -X in and configure/fix stuff easily (and please do not mention rdp... just - no).}

[Liam Proven]

Re: Always looking the wrong way at the wrong thing.

> To which the answer was "In your browser". Okay, it's broken, but not much worse than the official desktop version.

Yeah, that's what I thought.

But they did say _15 years ago_. There was a Linux Mint 15Y ago but was there a web-based Outloook? I don't think there was.

I've spent this century avoiding Outlook so I am not sure. (Which is odd as I was a certified Exchange admin in the '90s and made good money deploying and fixing lots of Outlook. Thing is, that is _why_ I avoid it...)

[theOtherJT]

Re: Always looking the wrong way at the wrong thing.

Yes. There was.

It was terrible.

[kmorwath]

Re: Always looking the wrong way at the wrong thing.

OWA was available only for Exchange users - there wasn't outlook.com.

And it is not more terrible than any webmail - all of them are bad. That's why people still look for Outlook until Nadella finishes to kill it.

[Handy Plough]

Re: Always looking the wrong way at the wrong thing.

For the sake of fuck!!! Webmail has been a thing since the mid 1990's. Christ, CEARN had a webmail system running 2 years after Sir Tim had unleashed HTTP and HTML. Hotmail (which was outlook.com before the rebrand) was originally styled HoTMaiL (get it) was released in 1997 and in high use before the turn of the millennium. Milleniels seem to think that the internet, and computing generally, only really happened in the 2010. So, LionelB's response of "In your browser" was perfectly feasible 15 years ago (wasn't the world and their neighbour using Gmail at that point?), but it is a classic Linux-user-does-exactly-what-they-accuse-big-tech-of and tell the user that they're holding it wrong.

[williamyf]

Re: Always looking the wrong way at the wrong thing.

Yes there was outlook via web 15 years ago.

Heck, I used outlook for web in 2001. It was junk at that time. ¿In 2010? IDK

Edit: Ninja'd by theOtherJD

[sweh]

Re: Always looking the wrong way at the wrong thing.

This is where things get complicated. If you used corporate Exchange servers in 2010 then it also came with a (really bad) version of OWA; Outlook Web Access. It did the barest minimum necessary for a web based mail/calendar but it really wasn't a replacement for the fat client.

outlook.com, as a web service, didn't start until around 2013 ( https://news.microsoft.com/source/2013/02/18/microsoft-officially-launches-outlook-com/ )

So it's very possible that a user in 2010 using the Outlook application was using it as a POP3 client (IMAP if they were lucky) to another mail service.

[coredump]

Re: Always looking the wrong way at the wrong thing.

> So it's very possible that a user in 2010 using the Outlook application was using it as a POP3 client (IMAP if they were lucky) to another mail service.

It stuns me to realize you're probably right. E.g. using an Outlook application to read Yahoo!mail or AOLmail (was that still a thing back then?). Working in tech in the 90's I associated "Outlook" with "Exchange", and usually "on-site" at that; presumably that isn't the majority case these days.

Now I wonder if what happens today: ie. do some people actually prefer the Outlook client on its own merits, regardless of the mail service they're connecting to? Reading their gmail with an Outlook client (assuming such a thing is possible).

Perhaps it's worth considering what the end-user is really asking for when they say "Where's Outlook?" </speculation>

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Always looking the wrong way at the wrong thing.

There's also Outlook the current name for the email service that was formerly Hotmail and, in between, Live. This, of course, is the MS way of doing things - wrap as many different products as possible in the same name to persuade the gullible that they're all the same thing and you have to take the lot of them.

[FirstTangoInParis]

Re: Always looking the wrong way at the wrong thing.

MS are incessantly fiddling with the Outlook UI at the moment. Goodness knows why. The classic but old looking UI still works well. The new then new new then new new new then new new new new Outlook is just a massive muddle. Every change comes with obvious UI bugs that are quickly fixed, but still. Trying to guide users with basic IT skills is becoming a moving feast.

[collinsl]

Re: Always looking the wrong way at the wrong thing.

New¹⁴ Outlook is just an Electron app using OWA, so any changes made to OWA will probably reflect in the New²¹ Outlook.

[Dave_A]

Re: Always looking the wrong way at the wrong thing.

People primarily use Outlook with Exchange (or it's cloudy 365 equivalent).....

365 makes it so outlook can access your work email from anywhere without a VM - because instead of connecting to an on premises Exchange server you connect to Microsoft...

PST folders are still unfortunately a thing, even for cloud....

Email clients really aren't a thing for home users - they all use webmail...

[nijam]

Re: Always looking the wrong way at the wrong thing.

> I've spent this century avoiding Outlook so ...

... maybe you're not the right person to complain about the alternatives being no use to (fill in your choice of user category here).

[djnapkin]

Re: Always looking the wrong way at the wrong thing.

> maybe you're not the right person to complain about

Exactly. If you are not trying different offerings, don't pretend to be able to comment about them.

Outlook is similar to the original Win95 design, in that, they just got it right. I also use Thunderbird, but is it a better UI design than Outlook ... ???

[djnapkin]

Re: Always looking the wrong way at the wrong thing.

> was there a web-based Outloook?

Microsoft invented the xmlhttprequest, which revolutionised the web experience, precisely for Outlook for Web. So, yes, there was.

[Dan 55]

Re: Always looking the wrong way at the wrong thing.

Only Microsoft can release Outlook for Unix/Linux.

If they don't, you could log into OWA with a browser. New Outlook and OWA are practically at parity because they're both web apps (fine for web mail, terrible for a desktop app).

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Always looking the wrong way at the wrong thing.

A couple $JOB ago, corporate IT finally got their wish and mandated Outlook for all -- not even IMAP with your client of choice -- Outlook, to o365. Done.

Lots of (mostly Linux) engineers hated it, of course, and no small few ended up leaving; I don't know how many left just (or primarily) due to the outlook thing, but this was a company making products based on BSD and Linux, with many engineers preferring same, but being forced to do it from Windows and hating it. I suspect for many of them enforced Outlook was simply the last straw.

It nearly was for me as well, especially after trying the full Windows desktop Outlook client. It felt cumbersome, clunky and slow to me, particularly doing any kind of editing, in the compose box and mousing or arrowing around -- seemed primitive when you're used to unix editors' motion keys, regexes, and so on.

But shortly after, one of my coworkers said "try the outlook web client", so I did, and stayed on it for the last couple years of my tenure there. Mind, I'm not saying I wouldn't have rather been using Evolution or Thunderbird, or really Mutt, but the "owa" thing in a browser wasn't completely terrible. Which is to say, not really any worse than most other email web clients.

I never got to the point of liking owa, but I got used to it. And if I had to take another gig at a shop using o365 for mail, I think I could make do with it again, providing I could do it from the browser or my choice running on the desktop/laptop of my choice, which is to say Firefox on Linux or BSD.

[Eric 9001]

Re: Always looking the wrong way at the wrong thing.

microsoft has committed to never releasing their core windows (definitely not) malware on LiGNUx.

Evolution with evolution-ews is the free replacement for outlook and it is in fact functionally superior to outlook.

[keithpeter]

Re: Always looking the wrong way at the wrong thing.

"All went well - until they said "Where's mu Outlook ?""

I take the point, but these days, they would be logging into Microsoft365 and using their apps in the Web browser. Can do that from Windows, MacOS or Linux/BSD.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: these days, they would be logging into Microsoft365

Yes - a generation on since the best chance there has ever been of achieving a mass switch to a Linux desktop.

A lot of the preceding comments here are from the sort of people who will rock up at a place, get a quote, and then tell the salesman "Bob down the road can do it for <x>".

Can he ? Can he really ? Can he aye ?

The comment about Thunderbird skipped over the fact that originally calendar functionality was provided by the Lightening plug-in. And (support for that) was dropped for a time. So there was no "official" way to provide the email+calendar functionality that ordinary desktop users wanted.

WIKI:

Version 0.9 was the last planned release for Thunderbird 2. A calendar was originally to be fully integrated into Thunderbird 3, but those plans were changed due to concerns with the product's maturity and level of support.

I was there. I know there was a time when calendar functional for Thunderbird was aspirational at best. And you simply can't sell that to anyone who is used to logging on to a desktop where Outlook autostarts.

To be rather brutal about it, if Linux desktop was going to succeed, it would have. But while MS has been quietly pushing the boundaries of how far it can lock corporations in, Linux desktop has been touring the cognoscenti. Where it will remain in perpetuity (which sounds like another Linux package)

[prh99]

Re: Always looking the wrong way at the wrong thing.

That just sounds like someone who wants Outlook and nothing else unless it's an exact clone.

[Dan 55]

"Imagine if instead of Vim, we had 23 different Vi clones"

We almost do:

vi Clones

Also neovim, qe, and some others which are vi modes in GUI software.

[Liam Proven]

Re: "Imagine if instead of Vim, we had 23 different Vi clones"

> We almost do:

>

> vi Clones

Oh, nice one! Well played!

TBH I had not heard of 3/4 of those.

Vile isn't an editor; it's an Emacs mode. Most of the rest aren't FOSS or aren't for xNix or have some other excluding factor -- but still, a great list. Nicely done.

[Graham Perrin]

Not that I'm prejudiced, but …

Speed-reading https://www.linfo.org/vi/clones.html (five seconds) I saw "ffer" and read "suffer". Oops.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: "Imagine if instead of Vim, we had 23 different Vi clones"

I'm not sure it's correct to say, as the link does, 'nvi is the "official" Berkeley clone of vi, and it is included in FreeBSD and the other BSD variants.' given that Berkeley is where vi was written. Before Berkeley there was no vi.

[Dan 55]

Re: "Imagine if instead of Vim, we had 23 different Vi clones"

Seems the first vi was written by a student at Berkley (Bill Joy) and nvi was also written by a student at Berkley (Steve Kirkendall) -> source

It was remiss of me not to look on texteditors.org in the first place...

[cdegroot]

There's well over a billion people using the Linux distro called "Android" (I use the GrapheneOS variant). So it _can_ be done.

(Desktop-wise, I use StumpWM with some XFCE4 helpers and yes, I wish the world for mix and match were simpler than dbus and polkit).

[theOtherJT]

Except that "android" can look wildly different from one phone to the next depending on how much the manufacturer of said phone decided to mess with it. For some reason when it comes to phones tho, no one seems to mind. I wonder if it's not because with phones you very rarely have to use someone elses, you just get used to the one you have each time you buy a new one.

[John Brown (no body)]

"you just get used to the one you have each time you buy a new one."

Sort of like when Windows and/or Office get their biannual major updates and change stuff, sometimes wildly and millions of users have to re-learn how to use their "standard" OS :-)

[Roland6]

Probably more like a new car. Until the advent of OTA updates, the car you got back from a service was exactly like the one you put in for service, just now everything works.

What you are describing is the world that the likes of Tesla want, because it enables them to extract more money from you and because you are constantly having to re-acquaintt yourself with there product, you can’t be spending time doing something more useful like enjoying the drive…

[John Brown (no body)]

I had a car that went in for a service and came out with some quite disconcertingly different behaviour. The fly-by-wire accelerator went in with an artificial "stop" near the top end to discourage putting your foot down to the floor. When it came out, the "stop" was at quite low revs, making it feel like something was wrong and it was harder to pull away quickly. I went back and queried what was wrong with the car. "Oh, yes sir, it was a software update". Me: "And you didn't think to mention that a safety-critical change had been made to the way the car operates? Thanks mate!!". Clearly something I got used to very quickly, and something I came across regularly when I had hire cars while mine was in for a service, but I never expected such a wild change to the fscking accelerator behaviour when getting my own fscking car back!

[PRR]

> with phones ..... you just get used to the one you have each time you buy a new one.

Aint that the truth. I just got a 2025 Moto to replace my 2022 Moto. I could not answer a call! (A near disaster b/c the landline went out the same day and we were waiting on some medical results.) Later I discovered that I could not turn the phone OFF. Both UI functions had been over-ridden by AI functions. I finally found "Answer on press" and "Turn off on press" and that works.... but what other stupidity lurks? Well the BlueTooth won't connect to my hearing aid, which is why I was trying to do a full cold start.

[Roland6]

>” Well the BlueTooth won't connect to my hearing aid, which is why I was trying to do a full cold start.”

I’ve repeatedly had this with Apple phones(*), namely to get them to reliably connect to hearing aid/cochlea implant you have to clear out the Bluetooth settings (yes delete all registered devices), reset, reboot and then pair the hearing aid as the first Bluetooth device. Once that is all working, only then attempt to pair with other devices.

(*) Also had it with my Huawei - when investigating the issue, so not specifically an Apple problem, just that most of my deaf friends have iPhones…

[kmorwath]

Sure - when a company the size and power of Google make it.

If Google had made a desktop for Linux, it could probably force it as the de-facto standard. But Google doesn't want you to process any data it can't put its notse into. Chrome is OK because it controls it fully. Android is OK because it totally controls it too, with Linux desktop, it could be harder.

[John Brown (no body)]

You've never heard of Chrome OS or Chrome Books?

[Taliesinawen]

A design that originated in Window?

> .. a clear large majority of desktop environments in FOSS today share the same design, and it's a design that originated in Windows. Nearly 20 years ago, Microsoft threatened to sue over it. It never happened ..

Because Microsoft borrowed most of the elements from Apple. Apple sued Microsoft in March 1988 over borrowing "look and feel". Microsoft's defense was; you borrowed it from the same place we did - Xerox's Palo Alto.

[Liam Proven]

Re: A design that originated in Window?

> Because Microsoft borrowed most of the elements from Apple. Apple sued Microsoft in March 1988 over borrowing "look and feel". Microsoft's defense was; you borrowed it from the same place we did - Xerox's Palo Alto.

No, not a fair point at all.

Remember the bit in the article where I said "please read the previous one"?

READ THE PREVIOUS ONE.

*NO PART* of the stuff I am talking about is taken from Apple or Xerox. The Apple-ish parts of Win9x are basically universal to all desktop WIMP GUIs now. The _entire point_ of Win9x was to do something which _did not infringe on Apple IP_ while making a coherent comprehensible desktop GUI that played to Windows 2 and more to the point 3.x's strengths. So, it has great keyboard controls, it emphasizes multitasking to the extent of integrating a task switcher as a core part of the GUI...

So Win9x does not have a global menu bar. It does not have an Apple menu analogue with global system-management functions. It does not have desktop drive icons. It does not even have a fixed "this is the current app" indicator.

Much of the design is from Windows 1, 2 and 3, because it was Windows 4. But all the stuff that's new in 95 can be _defined and explained_ as "do it in a way totally unlike Apple, so we don't get sued."

While classic MacOS hid it, because classic wasn't very good at multitasking. Almost the only clue was an app name at the _right_ end of the global menu bar.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: A design that originated in Window?

Also. IIRC, Alto didn't have overlapping windows either. That might have risked them being sued by Apple although they might have got away with in on account of not having round corners.

[tsundoku]

Re: A design that originated in Window?

The story I heard was that the Apple people assumed Xerox had overlapping windows (they did not) and nearly drove themselves crazy implementing it on the Mac, not realizing that they were pioneering something.

[GuldenNL]

Re: A design that originated in Window?

Almost right, but not quite. While working at *** in the early 90s I met with Apple as they were a customer and we were trying to do some things they had failed at (speech recognition.)

Long story short, Xerox Alto and its Smalltalk OS did have overlapping windows that could be moved and resized. (Will come back to this.)

Xerox Star which was a later, commercial product was exactly like what you said.

Bill Atkinson at Apple thought Alto had refreshing and self repairing windows (it didn't, you had to click the window you bright to the front to refresh it.) so he invented QuickDraw and the concept of Regions as the basis of the Macintosh Window Manager.

He had just left Apple when I met with them & was spoken about in hushed voices, much more admired than Steve Jobs at that time, at least by the Engineering team that is.

[djnapkin]

Re: A design that originated in Window?

Well explained, Liam.

When 95 came out I realised they'd taken the existing program menu shortcut boxes from Win 3 (never used Win2 or earlier) and re-purposed them into the casscading fly out start menu. Simple and genius.

[tsundoku]

Re: A design that originated in Window?

I always considered Mac OS's concept of addressing applications as discrete units rather than mere groupings of windows to be a killer feature. Like okay, I want my web browser windows to all go away now, and I'll bring them back later with a single action. To my knowledge, Windows still doesn't really have an answer to this.

I'm also fond of the applications menu for being good with Fitt's Law and not taking up much screen space, even if its design may be just a side effect of MultiFinder showing up and getting integrated into the system later on, needing to be shoehorned into the existing design with minimal disruption. It worked for me.

[Roland6]

Re: A design that originated in Window?

The laugh is, with W11, it is obvious MS have taken design ideas from Apple…

[Philo T Farnsworth]

Re: A design that originated in Window?

Just for the record, it's Xerox Alto, not Xerox Palo Alto.

One of the industry's greatest missed opportunities.

[ChoHag]

Linux desktop environments will work together the day after their authors' egos do.

[Doctor Syntax]

Maybe they should get together and form something like https://www.freedesktop.org

[theOtherJT]

I don't know if the Unix philosophy can work here.

It's possible that a graphical desktop is just too complex an object for the whole stdin/stdout/stderr pass all messages as text is actually a viable solution. I'm actually struggling to imagine what a genuinely "universal" messaging bus for graphical applications might look like even. One of the reasons Windows 95 was able to be as simple as it was was that they were much simpler times. We can't even consistently handle multi-monitor support for cases where the different monitors have very different DPIs yet. God forbid you have multiple touch-sensitive displays attached. Some of the weird things that happen under Gnome when you dock a laptop with three or more desktop monitors of varying resolutions and rotations are just... yuch.

I'd settle for one desktop that actually works consistently within itself before we start trying to cull down the outliers, and we don't even have that.

[PerlyKing]

Re: I'd settle for one desktop that actually works consistently within itself

I think that's Liam's point: if some of the desktop projects would merge, they would have a better chance of creating a single coherent system instead of having multiple desktops which have a lot of overlap and fail in different ways.

But, of course, it's notoriously difficult to herd a group of volunteer nerds in a single direction :-/

[graemep]

The Reg keeps confusing the default setup of most Linux desktops (look like something familiar) with the only way they work. New users prefer to start with something that looks familiar, those who care can customise to what they want.

My KDE desktop does not have a start button at all, nor a panel at the bottom. I do have something like a start button on my desktop, but it does not open a Windows like hierarchical menu but a full screen searchable grid of icons - although you can click on one level of categories to narrow things down. I did much the same when I used XFCE.

Dolphin, the KDE file manager, can look like a two paned orthodox file manager, depending on what choices you make in the "view" and "split" menus and buttons. Konqueror (its predecessor, which is still around) is even more versatile and can preview in panes etc.

, but you only got one, and you couldn't change its length, or re-arrange or resize its contents, let alone change their orientation.

SO Windows 95 was better than Linux desktops because it would not let you do things.

Users should be free to – for example – use the MATE panel with the Xfce window manager, the Cinnamon file manager, and the Budgie start menu.

Not sure about that particular combo, but you definitely can use XFCE with a different window manager, and the same with KDE. You can use use any file manager in any desktop environment I have ever tried (there are settings to change default file managers). Some panels will work with different desktop environments or with plain Window managers but its not something I have done myself.

[theOtherJT]

Sometimes the things that you can't do are more important than the things that you can. Many a project has died because by trying to be all things to all men it managed not to be terribly good at any of them.

[Doctor Syntax]

"My KDE desktop does not have a start button at all, nor a panel at the bottom. I do have something like a start button on my desktop, but it does not open a Windows like hierarchical menu but a full screen searchable grid of icons"

Mine, OTOH does have a start button and it does raise a hierarchical menu which is not quite Windows-like in that I can edit the hierarchy as I please.

That's what choice and flexibility are for. We each get a UI we prefer, working as we prefer.

[Carnotaurus]

Keep dreaming

The non-techie users, which will always outumber the techie ones, will want consistency. You guys can love Linux all you want, but unless these non-techies are almost all on them on the same page, your year of the desktop will remain an elusive dream. And while you're at it, stop the chilish infighting. I swear, Torvalds needs chill pills.

[Adair]

Re: Keep dreaming

Another one who seems not to 'get it' when it comes to what FLOSS(Linux, and other OSes) are actually all about—it's this 'freedom' thing.

It doesn't necessarily give you what you want, but you are free to make it how you want it, i.e. freedom to a particular kind of crapness. And if you can't do that, then you are free to live with what other's have decided they want—another kind of crapness. Too much 'freedom'? Walled gardens are available, to varying degrees of their own particular kind of crapness.

[theOtherJT]

Re: Keep dreaming

The non-technical user doesn't give a shit about consistency. If they did, they wouldn't put up with what Microsoft keep doing to Windows.

The non-technical user just doesn't care one way or another. If there's a choice to be made, it's whatever is the pre-selected box. First in the list. Whatever was provided. They do not give a shit - in the slightest - about anything to do with their computer. Windows? I don't even know what that is. Apple? Why not, I've heard they're expensive, so they're probably good, just so long as I don't have to pay for it. Linux? Sure, whatever, but stop asking me questions, nerd, I don't care!

Non technical users get on with Linux just fine if they're just given it and not given any choices. Most of them couldn't tell you what they were using anyway. In ten years of running an open-access computer room with a few dozen Windows and a few dozen Linux boxes, there was precisely no difference in the take-up because all anyone ever did with them was log in and check their email, and then, about half the time, print it. Both options could do that fine and 99% of people never did anything else. I would bet folding money that most of them didn't even realize that there were different operating systems available, because once they had the corporate splash screen up over the login prompt you had to look quite hard to tell them apart. The people that needed one or the other knew. Everyone else didn't care.

The reason they'll never choose Linux is because they don't want the choice and will get angry if asked to make it, so they'll have whatever is the default and right now that's Windows. As long as MS can keep everyone selling PC's with Windows pre-installed the default will stay Windows.

[FirstTangoInParis]

Re: Keep dreaming

Many years ago I was doing design evolution studies for an in-service system. I gave them options in the report with reasons for and against. The customer response? Don’t give me options, just tell me what you think is best. That told me everything I needed to know. Customers don’t like choice. Indeed even buying a PC is a bewildering exercise because of the choice.

[Liam Proven]

Re: Keep dreaming

> Don’t give me options, just tell me what you think is best.

And this is _the_ core reason for the relatively great success of Ubuntu.

It made the best choices it could, for the consumers, so they didn't have to.

And yet, here we are, with a hundred other distros offering more choice -- and wondering why people gravitate to the one that removes choice. 20+ desktops offering more choice than GNOME, and yet GNOME keeps selling. And a hundred comments going "ah, but look at me, I chose something different! That proves that choice is important!"

"We added more choice and that proves it's better. Didn't a dozen leading distros bundle our desktop just 5min ago? Now we added more choice, so it is better! So you can clearly tell-- hey, where did all the users go?"

Not to mention the loud confident types who didn't read the previous article on this theme -- despite the injunction to do just that -- and tell me "but don't you see that a square IS A TYPE OF TRIANGLE!" or "Look at my hexagon, and you can CLEARLY SEE it is really a form of square!"

*sigh*

[theOtherJT]

Re: Keep dreaming

Thing is, gnome is a good desktop. It might be a bit of a mess in terms of how it's built, but from a usage point of view it's clean and consistent and doesn't do anything really obviously stupid. I'd like it better if Ubuntu tried a bit less hard to stop you moving the task bar (after 30 odd years of it I'm very used to it being along the bottom and would like it to stay there please*) but I'm pretty sure that's more a them thing than a gnome thing. Other than that it's absolutely fine. It does what it needs to do - which is be unobtrusive and get out of my way.

*Yes, I'm aware you can move it back, and I have, but I'm annoyed that I had to install extensions to do it.

[PRR]

Re: Keep dreaming

> better if Ubuntu tried a bit less hard to stop you moving the task bar

Doing school support, one of the common "problems" was the task bar moved to an unexpected edge or dragged-out over-large. May seem "obvious" to you lot, but not for non-techies. And a few of them had managed to pervert their taskbar I-don't-know-how. I think Pat managed to fill his screen with taskbar?

So there should be a safety lock. It should not deter someone like you more than a jiff, of course. (There actually is a "lock the taskbar" option in this Win7, but the most fun was early Win95.)

[GuldenNL]

Re: Keep dreaming

I dumped Ubuntu back around 2010 when they went to Unity as the desktop default. They were looking toward touch/phones & dumbed down the UI.

Yes, this flexible tech guy immediately threw it out the window (ouch!) not because it was so different, it was so dumb.

And yes, I could have changed the desktop out and stayed with Ubuntu, but like many, I did that by moving to Mint.

I have a laptop with KDE, specifically Fedora Kinoite. Just to stay on top of Plasma developments, but rely on Mint to get stuff done. So I'm like non-techies in that I just want to get stuff done and not have to have multiple little struggles every day adapting to a new interface.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Keep dreaming

"The non-techie users, which will always outumber the techie ones, will want consistency."

Is this the consistency that ran through W7, W8, W10 to W11? That ran from Office 95 to Office 21 or whatever it currently is? The consistency that has experienced Windows users here bitching about this, that or other aspect of the Windows UI.

Like I said in another thread, a marketing playbook is to take whatever it is you fear most in your competition and disparage it as if it's bad.

[tiggity]

Re: Keep dreaming

@Carnotaurus

Consistency?

MS products and MS OSes UIs keep changing (& often quite significantly).

e.g. on Win11 I now have to do an extra click via right click menu (compared to W10) to get at a lot of functionality that was previously avaialble on the "main" right click menu (as stated on a previous comment, work machine, no admin access so I cannot do reg hacks to workaround it)

Not to mention continual alterations to start menu..

MS products - the ribbon is the most famous mega change that totally broke what people were used to.

I have to use Outlook & Teams a lot, they keep getting irritating UI changes.

[IGnatius T Foobar !]

Microsoft did not invent the "Windows 95" desktop

Please do not suggest that other desktops mimic Windows 95. What this article describes as the "Windows 95 desktop" design originated with RISC OS , back in the days when Micros~1 was still futzing around with Program Manager.

Microsoft does not invent. They never have invented anything novel.

[ecofeco]

Re: Microsoft did not invent the "Windows 95" desktop

I had to scroll this far down for the correct answer.

[Mage]

Re: Microsoft did not invent the "Windows 95" desktop

Yes, I've used GEM, RiscOS, Amiga and Atari ST. I looked at OS/Warp, but it was doomed by expense and poor support.

I saw a Xerox Alto before I had the crap Apple II. I also had an ACT Sirius 1 before IBM PC was sold in UK & Ireland. I used CP/M on Z80 before DOS. Did MS do Word for Windows & Excel for Windows from scratch? First released on Apple Mac because Windows was rubbish till 3.1

Also for Win95 MS was stupid and added Autorun!

[Liam Proven]

Re: Microsoft did not invent the "Windows 95" desktop

> design originated with RISC OS

No it did not. I used RISC OS from 2.01 onwards. Don't try to school me when you don't understand the lesson.

Go read the previous articles, and learn about things like the difference between _app_ icons and _window buttons_.

[Blackjack]

There would be at least four desktop GUIs less if GNOME had not fucked up so much.

I like having choice, if you have no choice you end stuck using a piece of faulty spyware disguised as an Operating System because they know they have a monopoly.

[DoctorNine]

Say again.

"..LXDE has been very quiet for a few years since the main developer moved on to LXQt..."

What you did there. Did you see it? Because I think I see it. If you meant it. I think.

[Fonant]

Tried for HP/Sun/IBM/SiliconGraphics

I remember the Common Desktop Environment (CDE) for early unix workstations, an attempt at a standard windowing environment for workstations from HP, Sun, IBM and Silicon Graphics. It was "OK".

Nerdy people like customising their UIs, which is why some like me love Vivaldi as a browser. So nerdy people will always result in a proliferation of desktop UIs.

[coredump]

Re: Tried for HP/Sun/IBM/SiliconGraphics

There's truth to that, but also degrees.

That is, there's customization, and then there's Customization!!!. :-)

E.g. going all the way back to TWM and then IRIX 4Dwm (still my favorite) I nearly always changed the desktop background, and certainly changed the xterm background and foreground colors. Not a lot beyond that.

At some point when I'd moved to other OSes with XFree and later Xorg, I tried Fvwm[2] and found I could tweak even more things, but it mostly ended up being changing menu item content, default startup positions for the clock and terminals and such, plus the aforementioned back/foregrounds.

Nowdays with Xfce I go a bit further: e.g. I slide the lower panel away from default center over to the corner and set it to auto-hide since I don't use it often. Top panel gets my preferred app icons (primarily the terminal) with a few widgets for clock, virtual desktop selector, and niceties like volume and battery on the laptop.

... plus the historical back/foreground colors, font sizes, etc. that I've been doing for decades now. I've been using the same Xfce layout for years, modulo the occasional minor adjustment.

Really, I could probably still be using TWM/Fvwm, or others like ctwm, for the way I work, even after all these years, because my setup from back then is fundamentally similar to today. I imagine I'm essentially echoing Liam's article. Maybe it's a credit to the Xfce devs that I don't feel a need to dramatically depart from their defaults.

I would be irritated if I couldn't change a few things like the above, but wouldn't be greatly bothered by an inability to rearrange the entire desktop at whim. I suspect a lot of folks feel the same way.

[James Anderson]

Re: Tried for HP/Sun/IBM/SiliconGraphics

Oh god that brings back awful memories.

Trying to set install an application in CDE on an underpowered HP workstation. I could not believe how complex and fiddly this committee devolved desk top was. So a machine that cost three times as much as a windows box took an entire day to get the application up and running via CDE (a process that took 10 minutes on windows ) and ran slower when eventually started. And people wander how windows got its monopoly.

[skierpage]

Re: Tried for HP/Sun/IBM/SiliconGraphics

> I remember the Common Desktop Environment (CDE) for early unix workstations

"Early"?!? Wikipedia says the first version of CDE was released in June 1993, a full decade after the first Unix workstations.

"Sun had introduced support in 1983 for a window-based environment known as the Sun Window System, providing the Sunwindows (or SunWindows) window manager and Suntools (or SunTools) user interface toolkit."

[zagl]

Missing the point

I feel like the incentives aren't really ever included in these discussions.

Microsoft centers itself on one desktop environment because that's what's most economically advantageous. It shouldn't be forgotten that every desktop environment was likely created because somebody wanted something *for themselves* which other DEs didn't provide.

When we're talking about how they're missing the opportunity for the user experience, I don't agree, because they're both the user and creator.

If you have a problem with them only considering themselves that's fine, but nobody should be judging their efforts as if their unpaid work was intended to benefit the average person without that being explicitly stated.

[keithpeter]

Re: Missing the point

The article is bracketing together large projects such as Gnome and KDE that provide a desktop environment together with the small 'scratching an itch' projects such as (perhaps) JWM.

The large projects tend to want to provide a unified experience with either specially written desktop functions such as file managers or at least 'curated' ones. The smaller ones tend to focus on a window manager or perhaps an add-in panel.

As another poster says, most components of most desktop environments can inter-operate to some extent and there are sets of standards for things like notifications, inter-process messaging and so on.

So what do people think could be a first move towards reducing duplication? Basically which set of standards and protocols does some body or organisation select as ' the standard desktop' and then what do people have to be asked to stop doing? Not sure how you broker those kinds of agreement amongst what are independent (sometimes volunteer) projects upstream of distributions.

Or will it be a 'first-to-market' solution with a hardware package something like steamOS / console or the KDE Linux pre-installed on a mass-market device becoming very popular?

Icon: I'm dubious about how this gets started.

[zagl]

Re: Missing the point

I think it's a matter of time, really. Look at the adoption of Wayland over the past few years.

It's super high friction, but stuff is getting done

[soupy]

We already have this, almost

> But they could work together and cooperate.

Standards do exist to make taskbars and other desktop elements interchangeable. As long as the components follow the standards, they mostly work together; the main issue that you see is that there isn't something standardized for all DE features. Of course, customizations and configurations all tend to be done in different ways.

In fact, one of the driving forces behind the development of Wayland was to make it easier to develop and use these standards. The situation is admittedly all over the place, but a surprising number of desktop components are interchangeable. X11 had equivalent standards (that were harder to follow but more widely adopted), so this isn't a new thing.

[Eric 9001]

Re: We already have this, almost

wayland in fact makes it harder to implement standards - as every wayland DE needs to implement every protocol from scratch - for example windowing functionality, window positioning, screen recording and key input scripting - while Xorg offers windowing and window positioning out of the box without the programmers needing to write anything (they can focus on the other parts of the DE) and screen recording software and input scripting software works no matter what Xorg DE you use.

wayland could have standardized screen locking, but it didn't?

[gerryg]

Way to miss the point

All these developers are scratching an itch. I have no insight why they are doing it and they have no obligation to meet my needs or demands.

To call it wasted effort is to attribute motive without evidence and I would suggest denigration. I consider myself lucky to be able to use what others have developed.

Case study Timothy Pearson (TDE) decided that KDE3 was where it was at and forked the code base. His time, his decision.

I quite liked Konqueror being a local file manager (everything is a file, after all) but despite the loss not enough to choose TDE over current KDE. I took a look, it was nostalgic but I'm tagging along as a mostly free rider with the KDE project. (I've also looked at a couple of the other desktops that openSUSE provides but KDE does it for me. My dislike of GNOME is entirely unevidence based.)

Of course all this was under my control (and responsibility) with no-one nagging me to do this or that. That's one of the plus points.

It's just how it is. I don't think diversity of desktop is a problem. The paid for edifice of commercial software might get so unwieldy that even their obscene marketing budgets might fail to stop the collapse (slight evidence that windows 11 might be in the space) leading to a significant search for an alternative but until then just be grateful for what you have got and stop worrying about the year of LOTD.

BTW on datelines KDE was a free evolution of Sun's CDE unfortunately although reassurances were in place at that time Qt was free as in beer not as in speech (now both) So the GNU project started GNOME.

[m4r35n357]

Re: Way to miss the point

Hacks have been telling devs whatr to do since the 1990s. Money for old rope.

[Eric 9001]

Re: Way to miss the point

GNU supported a free replacement of Qt (harmony) and supported a free replacement of motif (lesstif) and also started GNOME.

GNU developers and saint iGNUcius managed to convince Qt to adopt a free license (although it was a inconvenient one) and later managed to convince them to offer a dual license of GPLv2-only and LGPLv2.1-only (now GPLv2-only, GPLv3-only and LGPLv3-only) and harmony development ceased.

Qt is not always gratis - there is a proprietary version that costs money.

[BasicReality]

One desktop to rule them all.

[Dave_A]

Android.... Or ChromeOS.... Depending on what Google is thinking at this moment in time.....

[Dave_A]

Lets be real - there are only 2 Linux desktops that matter....

And Google owns both of them....

Android and ChromeOS....

Everything else is just duplicated effort ....

[Anonymous Coward]

xkcd

Please see the XKCD comic, standards #927

This is what happens

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry.....But Users Want APPLICATIONS Not "Window Managers".......

.....and users EVEN LESS do they want arguments about "technology"....................

So.....222 kernels......................please................give me a break!!!!..........................

[Eric 9001]

Re: Sorry.....But Users Want APPLICATIONS Not "Window Managers".......

To be honest, we could do with a free kernel, licensed under the AGPLv3-or-later, free of proprietary software, that is functionally as good as Linux.

If there was 222 free kernels, there would be no problem.

[cjcox]

Blather

Plenty of "reinventions" out there. And of course, they "come and go". Why?

So, we've got KDE which presents a Windows+ (emphasis on the plus) and we've got an MacOS-ish Gnome. They stay around because of the amount of dedication of those projects.

But, again, as mentioned, plenty of more radical ones out there.

In the "year of the Linux desktop", a radical UI change probably means longer deferral of the revolution (just saying).

IMHO, people want functionality and not radical UI changes. Concepts like right clicking for a context menu... I mean what do you replace that with? What is the more intuitive UI that everyone should be using instead?

I get the "the idea", but I think the desire for "better", isn't well thought out. With that said, as a long time KDE user, I do like the idea of better, from their perspective, which is not total reinvention (destruction?) of good UI concepts. But, they do lean Windows-ish vs MacOS-ish.

[timrichardson]

There will probably be a Wayland mass extinction event. Although I suppose in the general spirit of things, like the Japanese soldier who stayed "fighting" in the forest for 40 years, someone will keep X11 alive and some of these desktops will live on.

People are allowed to have hobbies. There's no guarantee that xfce developers would contribute to gnome if you forced the end of xfce.

Linux is supposed to work like this. I think it would be more worrying if we only had one desktop. If you think the correct number is more than one, then unless you have some magic way of defining what that number is, let it be (to quote The Beatles again)

[Eric 9001]

>someone will keep X11 alive and some of these desktops will live on.

I figure wayland is likely to go extinct before Xorg.

>someone will keep X11 alive and some of these desktops will live on.

XLibre.

>There's no guarantee that xfce developers would contribute to gnome if you forced the end of xfce.

Xfce4 developers would at most maintain the current used version of GtK.

>Linux is supposed to work like this.

It is rather GNU that is supposed to have the freedom (you can't with Linux, as it doesn't have freedom).

[Joe Gurman]

Microsoft….

…. probably didn’t sue any of the originators of the distros because they remembered how they got off scot free when Apple, with considerable justification, tried to sue them for the visual language in the Windows desktop, stolen directly from the Mac OS of the day (System some-number-or-other).

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Microsoft….

Which was in-turn copied/stolen by apple.

[Anon]

[Chorus]

Let's come together

Right now

Oh yeah

In sweet harmony

The Beloved

Just in case someone missed it...

[Liam Proven]

Re: [Chorus]

> The Beloved

Thank you! Yes, that was indeed the original inspiration for the title. :-)

[Mage]

Really, sounds like someone that hasn't customised a Desktop.

Really this is mostly nonsense.

The Explorer Shell as in Win95, Explorer Preview of NT 3.51 and NT 4.0 is better than base NT 3.x and Windows 3.11 / WFWG 3.11, but only the Start Menu and bar with status stuff was new. File Explorer was backward step from File manager, which could run on NT 4.0 desktop. On XP you could put the bar with icons, status and Start Menu on any edge (See Places)

They progressively broke the Start Menu and the Control Panel. Never fixed annoyances in File Explorer.

Gnome 3 is a disaster and forking Gnome 2 as Mate was good. Mate has "Places", with a choice of 3 start menus. They are full configurable on up to all four edges and expand or auto contract and can auto hide. Any colour or transparent. Mate is very flexible for Themes too, you can make it just like Win9x, 2K, XP, Server 2003, Win7 without Aero, Win1x, various Mac, etc. I've not tried to make it like Vista with Aero. There are a huge number of Themes to download. You used to be able to Theme Windows (Make XP like Win2K/Win9x/WFWG, Kill the Fisher Price look. You could also make Vista look much like Win2K) but now Win10 is a crap UI with zero flexibility and settings all over the place.

Years before I stopped using Windows I used almost like Program Manager groups of Icons as the Desktop got silly. Also editing the XP Start menu was painful. Editing the Mate Compact Start Menu is so much easier.

Mate can be far better GUI than Win9x if you spend 1 hour, ONCE. Though recent Mint updates remove the Synaptic Package manager, but it's on the "Software Manager" to add it back.

I used, programmed and taught Windows stuff from 1992 to 2005. Used macOS 9. Win10 reminds me of GEM on a Hercules card.

[El.Mich.]

Freedom (to think and do and use what one likes) seems to be the main cause of this "mess"

People are different and not everyone likes or even should like what someone else is liking for a good reason. Of course You are right, Mr. Proven, to describe this state as some kind of unnecessary mess but who is to decide what is right and what is wrong or even slightly better in some kind of way.

Most programmers in the FOSS world do their programming as volunteers and that way, if one thinks that they are capable of, when they see some kind of a problem they (can) decide that they can do better as the original programmer / developer and _fork_.

And most of all: Linux and FOSS in general is about freedom. Who is to decide what is right and what is wrong or just "better" than the other one?

Me too I've been using Linux since the mid 90ies and had to switch my desktops more than once, not always really voluntarily. :-( But in my opinion that's a small prize to pay compared to all the freedom that comes with all these choices!

And: Linux is not for everyone and all these guys continuously stating and praising what Windows can do and Linux cannot should simply stay with Windows. But then again please do not complain about all the nuisances in the way Microsoft tries to interfere with the users' workflow and the privacy of their data ...; or about the widespread dissemination of malware! That is the prize one has to pay for using Windows!

PS:

Perhaps there "should" be some kind of primary instance for such questions but who thinks they are really capable ot deciding all these questions? Me definitely not! ;-)

[Eric 9001]

Re: Freedom (to think and do and use what one likes) seems to be the main cause of this "mess"

Linux and FOSS are something that have nothing to do with freedom - every time I see "Linux" and "FOSS", I see proprietary software.

The freedom is with free software.

[El.Mich.]

Re: Freedom (to think and do and use what one likes) seems to be the main cause of this "mess"

What kind of fish do You like most? ;-)

Or slightly longer: You do know what the acronym FOSS stands for, do You or don't You?

[Eric 9001]

Re: Freedom (to think and do and use what one likes) seems to be the main cause of this "mess"

I like bass the most and I prefer my bass in the rivers and the sea where those belong.

"FOSS" stands for "Free and open-source software" - but that is almost always assumed to mean; gratis, source-available software.

Trying to group together the opposites of the freedom of free software and the dedication to serving corporate interests of "open source" is a ginormous contradiction.

Every time I see "FOSS" being used to refer to software, I check and it's usually proprietary software that is being referred to (sometimes the software uses an "open source development model" with partial source-code availability, but doesn't meet the "open source definition" and is not free software), or it is free software that has nothing to do with "open source".

Testing again, I searched "foss" in a search engine and I saw fosshub.com as a result.

Right on the main page there is proprietary software ("InfranView" and "Classic Shell").

There is also some free software listed on the page too qBittorrent (GPLv3+) and Audacity (GPLv2+).

[martinusher]

Its the curse of programmers

Bored programmers tend to tinker with things they have access to so its not surprising that UI's and tools ("language du jour") get a lot of attention.

I've always worked in the embedded area so I was quite happy with the original Sun X-Windows UI. It obviously could be -- and has been -- improved over the last 30 years but I've yet to find something as elegant and flexible as X. I'll use other UIs as necessary, of course -- even a command line if necessary -- but I'm not an enthusiast (I have a particular dislike for remote desktops -- in fact any 'desktop')(but then I still call 'folders' by their proper name, 'subdirectories' -- all this make believe "I'm working in an office and trying to channel my in and out trays etc. (and paperclips) is just BS).

[skierpage]

Re: Its the curse of programmers

> I was quite happy with the original Sun X-Windows UI. ... I've yet to find something as elegant and flexible as X.

X is not a toolkit, nor a UI, nor a desktop environment. Sun developed several of those prior to moving to X Windows: SunWindows, SunView, then NeWS (the rest of the workstation vendors infamously rejected the Network/extensible Window System fearing another Sun-dominated standard after the Network File System, so they coalesced on X11 instead). What flavor(s) of X11 DE from Sun are you remembering fondly, OpenLook, Motif, or CDE?

[kneedragon]

familiarity

Brodie Robertson put out a 40 or 50 minute clip, in the last 4 days, that had a long and detailed bitch about how slow and complicated it is getting Wayland going. Much of that was about wasted effort and duplication, and silly endless arguments and discussions about how to do something when there's already a perfectly good method for doing it. ie, he said almost the same things as Liam Proven.

----

I have said many time, I use and Like Mate, which grew from the death & reanimation / fork of gnome2. I like it because it works just like Win-95 ~ it's familiar. I don't need google to figure out how do some perfectly normal day to day thing. You do that roughly the way you did it in Windows 95. It's completely familiar and conventional, and I like that.

Is it the most beautiful desktop? meh ~ maybe not. Plasma is very likely prettier.

gnome 88 or gnome 317 or whatever we're up to now, seems to be slowly drifting back toward the conventional, but I hated gnome3 (and Unity) so much I left Ubuntu and went looking on Distrowatch, where the first one listed was Mint, and Mint had a new version in Beta, and that featured a new thing ~ a rebirth of the gnome2 environment called 'Mate.'

Fry ~ Futurama : "Shut up and take my money!"

That was about 2010 or '11, and I'm still on it and I have no intention of leaving.

I have two feet. Some would say they are both left-feet, but that aside, I've been using them for 63 years at this point. I have no desire or intention of removing them with a chainsaw and replacing them with new ones, not elephant feet, not tortoise feet, not horse feet ~ I am familiar with these even if they are not perfect, but I don't need web-search or an AI assistant to use them.

No ~ please don't go reinventing the Thumb, mine are old and clumsy but I know how to use them.

[JLV]

Definitely the voice of reason though I would have left out the comparison to Windows 95. Not because it is a bad comparison, but because a lot of the commentards went off chasing that particular rabbit rather than focussing on how the needlessly sprawling Desktop ecosystem could be rationalized a bit.

Short of that actually happening, my wishlist would be an underlying unified configuration system actionable through the command line. That way, you don't have to rediscover how each DE is configured by clicking through its apps and dialogs. And another would be much more emphasis on user-friendly touchpad management as well as power management. For the rest, I spend most of my time in the terminal, editors and web browsers so desktops specificities don't hold any great attraction to me as long as they remain responsive and light on the CPU.

[Zurich Gnome]

Grooving up slowly...

I liked the Beatles reference but didn't see what Flatpak had to do with desktop proliferation, until I remembered Snaps and Appimages.

Good one.

(BTW, I don't share Liam's enthusiasm for Snaps, and eliminated them from my Xubuntu installations as soon as they appeared, even investigating the format far enough to write shell scripts to repackage Skype snaps back to Deb packages when MS stopped releasing Debs - a wasted effort because MS decommitted Skype for general consumer use just a few months later. And desnapping Xubunt 24.04 LTS was tedious enough that I put Mint Xfce onto my laptops and will be using it on my main machine after the next Xubuntu LTS release. Apologies for the topic drift.)

[Ian 55]

Quite right

When all the desktops work together, we can move onto the real arguments like which init system to use or what is the one true packaging format...

[Luiz Abdala]

I am quite happy with the Windows 95 paradigm.

I don't care there are 23 flavors of desktop, that every linux distro had to make their own. There is no standard, but everybody knows what it must look like, how it must work and that's the actual standard, altough how you do them is up to you. They must have a launcher, a status bar, all the thing mentioned in the article.

But standards... they work for hardware. USB killed a bunch of interfaces, except for things that don't accept multiplexing, maybe. Some of them still exist virtually inside USB, like serial (no really, some gear still use 2400 baud 8N1 com1 serial lingo wrapped inside a usb carapace.)

HDMI wrapped video and audio together in a fashion that Holywood took no objection. I am still amazed I can potentially connect a 40 inch TV on my pc and get audio on it, because my GPU has a pass-through for HDMI. Not that single-cable is an HDMI novelty, and SCART existed long before that.

PCs themselves only exist because everybody agreed on standards, like ATX. (Dell disagrees.) The fact you can buy one piece of hardware from each vendor and everything works is nothing short of a miracle.

[Inspector71]

First and still best

I find I agree with Liam in that my favorite ever GUI is still the first one I ever used in real anger. The classic Mac OS. System 7.1 was about the sweet spot for me. When I tire of the clutter and busyness of the UI's I have to work with most days, for a palate cleanser so to speak, I fire up my SE/30 and maybe open Word 5.1.

Rose tinted, yes but did you get any less actually done?

[tsundoku]

I hate the Windows 95 desktop, so for my part I've been frustrated that so many open source desktops point in that direction in the first place, rather than that they fall short of the original. Because no such thing exists out of the box, I've put a lot of work into cobbling together a desktop environment on Linux that works something like Mac OS or BeOS. And to that point...

> Users should be free to – for example – use the MATE panel with the Xfce window manager, the Cinnamon file manager, and the Budgie start menu.

They already are, and I do such things myself (I'm running MATE with the panel disabled, FVWM as the window manager, and a sprinkling of other components from the likes of Window Maker and Xfce). Not every component is going to work 100% ideally with another, but nothing is stopping you from trying it and finding out whether you like what you get.

[steelpillow]

Nope

As a veteran of Amigatari, Motif and sundry other fossilised GUIs, I fear our Vulture has been at the funny stuff again.

Once the GUI appeared in public, a thousand flowers blossomed. They cross-pollinated wildly, some more influential than others. Windows 95 undeniably pulled together what is nowadays, and deservedly, known as the Classic desktop. For all I know MS did invent some of its enduring features, as did everybody at the time. Yet nothing has inherited /all/ of it. Clippy was SUCH an exciting idea at the time, central to the Windows experience they assured us. As the Start button still is, a millstone they can never shed - unlike the rest of us. Pick any group of GUI memes and something somewhere will have them all. But that something will also have a bunch of lemons too. Singling out any designer since Palo Alto is bollocks. A thousand flowers still bloom, and always will.

Then again, everybody loves Mobile. Many Classic features are now banned. No more menu cascades, just popup cascades with no way back. Nor more task/icon/status bars, just enigmatic icons scattered inconsistently across the GUI in different places in each window, even in the same app. And what do they open? Yes, another pop-up. Even the file-tree-on-the-right meme is starting to fall victim to the popup cascade. Getting back to anything remotely resembling Windows Classic is getting harder every day.

[Baximelter]

Let 100 flowers bloom. This is the path to excellence.

[JLV]

No. It remains the path to irrelevance.

- New users are overwhelmed with choice. Which people don't like in domains they are not familiar with. This is what happened in Python with its web frameworks, of which there were easily 10-12 of them, none with clear dominance. Eventually things settled down to 3 big ones with clearly established roles: Django for batteries included, Flask for simple and mix and match your tools, FastAPI to serve json. But until we got there, Ruby on Rails got a lot of traction for new users, even though Django came out less than a year later. I remember years of noobs asking "What framework would you recommend?" to which they got answers like "Define your use cases, then research the frameworks individually". That's pretty much "use Ruby on Rails", to me, unless you already know Python well. 23 desktops? Use Windows/Macos. Python never got a solid story going with a GUI framework, for exactly the same reasons.

- That also extends to pre-installed Linux on laptops. Buy 2 different pre-installed laptops and you'll have 2 very different experiences. From System76 to Framework to Dells. That's hard, at least to people who are not primarily computer folk. Article stated, what if we had 23 different VI clones? And it got some pushback that there are plenty of vi clones, from vim to neovim to... But they all use more or less the same core vi keymapping, so acquired knowledge is easily transferred. That's just not the case with desktops. It can't be.

- Documentation. Documentation is hard and usage knowledge is fragmented. How do you mount an external drive? Well, /etc/fstab is clear enough, if a bit hardcore. It is however, unified. Not so the user friendly GUI way when each desktop brings its own GUI widget to do this task. And then sometimes changes things from release to release, just for the sake of change. Like Apple is wont to do with its Music app. But the problem is that, to many people, who are "using Linux", they're not sure what flavor of DE "helpful guidance" on the internet refers to when trying to google how to get something done. Or package managers. Lots of them on the backend, from apt to rpm. But now you compound that complexity by each desktop delivering its own apt frontend. "OK, OK but what applies in my case???"

- Robustness and polish. With so many desktops blooming, each flavor lacks critical usage and developer base to really nail things down. Human interface hardware is hard, especially on laptops - mice, touchpads, audio, batteries... Typically you get a comparatively glitchy touchpad, compared to a Mac where it mostly just works. To tune it in on Linux, it seems you have the Synaptics approach, involving juggling a lot of numbers. Or there seems to be another way as well. This is where a nice unified GUI app would shine. Not happened yet. Power management? My Linux-compatible laptop, which officially supports 2 distros, doesn't really really want to hibernate. It's unclear why. Driver issue? Hardware issue? Distro issue? Kernel level? One user, defending the situation stated: "Well, you know, I use it plugged in all day, so I don't really worry about the battery". I.e. "you're holding it wrong". I mean, it is quite possible there is an actual optimal way to configure that laptop to hibernate, but that gets very lost in the noise of 3 people making 4 different suggestions on how to do it.

I really don't give a crap about the "100 flowers" or the "self-fulfillment of the unpaid volunteers scratching their itch" arguments. Linux is big money these days. I want to quickly configure my laptop, not read docs for hours on end. I want to use the boring vanilla desktop that just works, not marvel at rounded button corners with alpha transparency shadows. Then I'll spend time, in the terminals, browsers, Postgres and on my editors, doing what I enjoy: coding and configuring systems. And yes, reading docs for hours on end :-( Not faffing around with my desktop which just needs to be usable, fast and easy on the CPU and batteries. I.e. do its work and get out of the way. People who want to scratch their itch? Good on them! Doesn't relate with me.

I LIKE Linux mind you. But mostly once I am on the command line.

[JLV]

Plenty of other examples where fragmentation is harmful.

- JS frameworks. A new shiny is always coming out. React is more less or the de facto standard, now though. Not necessarily because it is the best, but because at least it brought some consolidation. Still, no one else is able to replace it because the rest is so fragmented and so much in flux. If there was a stronger #2, maybe people would remember that mixing HTML into JS goes against many computer principles about mixing code and formatting/markup.

- Unix, pre-Linux. Asianometry has a long and detailed YouTube on how things went wrong as each vendor insisted on their own flavor, no interop.

There was, long ago, 80s?, a short SF story, (Bruce Sterling?) about someone driving in a world where none of the roads, signage and bridges were the same and it all depended on which company "owned" the area. As a deliberate allegory to the computer industry's lack of standards.

[skierpage]

Lots of flowers, only two signigicant

> With so many desktops blooming, each flavor lacks critical usage and developer base to really nail things down.

Gnome and now KDE Plasma have enough usage and developer base to spend an appreciable amount of developer time and effort on fixing bugs, user experience, and polish. Demanding developers working on other DEs to stop isn't going to happen, and it prevents possibly even better approaches like Pop!OS's Cosmic desktop environment from flourishing.

[JLV]

Re: Lots of flowers, only two signigicant

We'll agree to disagree on spit and polish when getting basic stuff right like touchpads and hibernation tuned is a struggle. Well, at least gone are the heady days of diving into the xorg.conf (?) files by hand.

Look at my Python example: precisely no one told devs of less popular web frameworks to stop working on them. What happened instead is most of the general user base settled on only recommending the mainline ones. No one in the Python ecosystem has been saying "let a 100 flowers bloom" or "evaluate them for yourself" for at least 10 years. No one much misses that time and everyone realizes how much stronger Python's web story has grown as a result.

FastAPI btw is a relatively recent addition, based on new tech, so the system remains capable of accepting newcomers. It has just stopped chasing diversity for diversity's state.

Linux has all the technical depth and robustness to become a wonderful alternative to Windows (which is not without obscure registry-based foibles). It just needs to tell a more compelling story to people between the hardcore users and the stereotypical granny whose PC was configured by a family member sick of dealing with Windows crap.

Marketing, simplicity and a welcoming and tolerant community.

[ThomH]

Apologies, the 'send corrections' button doesn't seem to be working...

> Although tiny, [Windows 95] was a masterwork, and it re-defined the computer user interface in a way that wouldn't happen again until the iPhone, 22 years later.

I'm not sure that 2007 minus 1995 is 22.

[Dan 55]

Re: Apologies, the 'send corrections' button doesn't seem to be working...

The author wrote Windows 95 but was really thinking of the Commodore Amiga (released in 2007-22).

[david1024]

Lolz

The only way to heard the cats to a single, unified desktop would be to legislate it using a standard as the baseline. It could be done, procedurally ... but would be unpopular as a corporation would necessarily need to control it...

And we know how that story goes.

[RobDog]

Way too many

“ There are an almost ridiculous number of Windows-style desktops on Linux”

Yes there are, and too many distros, and those two facts hinder the take up of Linux.

Also, Linux has the problem that if something unexpected happens whilst e.g. installing something, the way back out to repair or replace it uninstall is very often unclear at best and at worst a mish mash of ‘techie’ geek nonsense. It’s what makes Linux appear the reserve of nerds but their sneering, competitive you-know-nothing-i-know-more-than-you attitude is equally unhelpful.

I use MacOS Windows and Linux in equal measure, since all of them were invented. I don’t have a preference, but Incan see why Linux isn’t more popular than it is.

[Dan 55]

Re: Way too many

Because MacOS and Windows have never got their knickers in a twist before and you've never seen any sneering on Apple's or MS' forums.

[LionelB]

Re: Way too many

> Yes there are, and too many distros, and those two facts hinder the take up of Linux.

Nah. The the two facts which hinder the uptake of (desktop) Linux are (a) for the home user it doesn't, like Windows or Mac, come pre-installed on your machine - and home users wouldn't bother to change OS even if they knew they could (which they quite likely don't); and (b) in the commercial sector many (most?) businesses are, for historical reasons, locked into the Microsoft ecosystem, and few have the nous, imagination or initiative to seek cheaper and/or better alternatives.

> Also, Linux has the problem that if something unexpected happens whilst e.g. installing something, the way back out to repair or replace it uninstall is very often unclear ...

That's just nonsense. Every graphical Linux package manager going has an "uninstall" button - not that I've even had the experience of anything "unexpected" happening when installing from repositories for many years.

[gosand]

Baloney... choice is key

Yes, there are many different desktops/wms. Choice is KEY to linux, it is what makes it flexible and powerful, and how we got here. Just because there is choice doesn't mean there can't be 'the most common' DEs. Just like "there are too many distros" - yeah, there are a lot, some die, some gain favor. But that is all for the power users and geeks (present company included).

There will always be people who don't understand the tech, and will always be confused by it. At one company I worked at I helped a coworker who said "the internet was down". His shortcut to Internet Explorer on his desktop got deleted. (and this was in 2015)

Choice in the Linux world should NOT be compromised. I think the suggestion of this article to get those major DEs together and work off of a common framework/standard/config or whatever would be good. In theory.

FYI, my 18 yr old son just decided on his own to ditch Win10. He jumped in with both feet and installed Arch Linux and is using Hyprland. I've been using Linux only since 1998, and I had never heard of Hyprland. After checking it out, it's not for me. But he loves it, and good for him!

[Eric 9001]

>Indeed, Linux itself, and the GNU tools they're built from,

GNU is not merely a collection of tools - tools are only a few GNU packages; http://gnu.org/software

It is Linux that is merely some tools (util-linux) and a kernel.

>are FOSS recreations of existing proprietary tools.

Being proprietary software, I agree Linux could be regarded as "FOSS", but GNU is free software.

While GNU has implemented clones of previous proprietary utilities, such replacements do not contain the defects of the original, have much higher performance and contain many excellent extensions, at least half of GNU packages are not clones and have no proprietary parallel.

The only similarities between Linux and proprietary Unix kernels is the monolithic design and how it's proprietary - the code is completely different.

>But despite over a third of a century of continuous development, there's only one Linux

That is not true - there are a several forks of Linux - but the general case is a soft fork - like GNU Linux-libre for example.

Meanwhile, it is true that there is only one GNU - the only GNU difference between GNU/Linux distros is which GNU packages and which versions are installed.

>a clear large majority of desktop environments in FOSS today share the same design, and it's a design that originated in Windows.

Just because windows claims credit for the generic design of a windowing desktop, that does not mean such design originated in windows.

Yes, many desktop environments look similar to windows, as that makes previous windows users comfortable - while a completely different design would not.

>Windows-style desktops on Linux – and mostly this applies to the BSDs, too

Linux has nothing to do with DE's, as decent DE's use Xorg - meaning the same DE will usually work fine on GNU/Linux and BSD's with a recompile.

>GNOME reinvented itself into something very un-Windows-like with version 3

GNOME aims to be a clone of macos's DE.

>Now we're up to 23. We could dig deeper, but we hope that we've made the point by now.

You're missing i3 - it's sad that it isn't realized that many users appreciate the freedom to choose between desktop environments and would regard an attempt to restrict LiGNUx to one DE as unacceptable.

>the basic concept of a round thing on the end of an axle.

A DE isn't as simple as the concept of a wheel.

>The window managers can't match the functionality of the Windows 95 Explorer

Of course a WM cannot match a DE - but DE's have gone far beyond that burning dumpster fire.

>not one of the desktops captures the simple elegance of the original

This is a sick joke.

>Windows 95 let you put the taskbar on any screen edge, but you only got one, and you couldn't change its length, or re-arrange or resize its contents, let alone change their orientation. Multiple rows was your only option.

How the users didn't have the freedom to merely adjust the taskbar was a defect of 95, not a feature.

>Imagine if instead of Vim, we had 23 different Vi clones, and every distro included most of them

Even though Vi Vim Vi is the editor of the devil, 23 free vi clones would be the purest exercise of freedom.

>does it seem likely that any of them would have attained the functionality of Vim?

Yes, at least one implementation would have attained the functionality of vim - there would be one or two implementations with the most development and 21 separate developers doing their own thing in freedom - rather than being forced to work on a project they don't want to work on.

>no useful way to combine a substantial program written in C with one written in C++ or Vala,

Those languages are compatible, as C++ has extern C and Vala compiles to C - thus it is possible (albeit usually not useful) to combine such programs.

>one written to use Gtk with one built in Qt. >But they could work together and cooperate.

GtK is a gnome project, while Qt is a commercial project - thus there is no real way to work together on GtK and Qt - but there is already cooperation for developing Xorg and wayland and libinput and cario and many other libraries - as those work with both GtK and Qt.

>Basics of the Unix Philosophy:

GNU's Not Unix.

>for example – use the MATE panel with the Xfce window manager the Cinnamon file manager, and the Budgie start menu.

Trivial - just install MATE and then install xfwm4 and cfm and budgie.

The cinnamon file manager and the budgie start menu are windowed programs that will run fine in any DE.

>All could share a common settings format. All should be able to read the same config files

It's ridiculous for a window manager and a file manager to share the same setting format - as those do completely different things.

The xfwm4 settings go under .config/xfce4/xfwm4 and the budgie settings could go under .config/budgie, which allows the users to configure each program they use easily.

>understand the same core lowest-common-denominator functionality established three decades ago

No, the cancer of the windows registry shall not be implemented (oh wait, GNOME already did - but who uses GNOME anymore?).

>represents a titanic waste of programmer effort, skill, and time.

Programmers exercising freedom in implementing a DE to their preferences is never a waste.

>Hundreds, maybe thousands of people, working hard for decades… but all on different projects, meaning that none of them achieve greatness.

Quite clearly a false claim - the thousands of GNU developers have achieve greatness despite mostly working separately on different GNU packages.

All DE's I've looked at do not have basic usability problems - as all decent GUI programs run regardless of the DE - it's simply the users preference as to which DE they'll like to run.

>It is 27 years since the first release of KDE, and I suspect that Microsoft has been laughing all the way to the bank ever since.

microsoft has been crying the whole time about there being superior replacements to theirs, but rather than making improvements, they've decided to do their absolute hardest to drive people away from using windows.

[DiskJunky]

Taxonomy

"et-propelled guided ark ship full of every known and unknown member of the Proboscidea from Ambelodon to Stegodon via deinotheres, elephants, mammoths and other mastodons"

...someone had way too much fun coming up with that...

[skierpage]

nothing to do with Flatpak; use KDE

I wouldn't have wasted my time on yet another article predictably complaining about desktop variety but for the mention of Flatpak in the subhead:

"Here come old FlatPak, it comes grooving up slowly..."

Yet the article has nothing to do with desktop- and distribution-independent application distribution. I assume Liam Proven didn't write write subhead; shame on The Registers editors trying too hard to be clever rather than informative.

Default KDE Plasma is fairly straightforward and easy to use; I've never bothered with " KDE Plasma's 36 launcher menus," so how is it hurting me that 35 people decided to scratch their own itch?