It would be really nice to explain what the differences between GNOME, Mate, Cinammon, Unity, KDE, XFCE, LXwhatever, etc are that make each of the "lightweight" or "heavyweight".
I did a recent Ubuntu MATE install, and that was the best desktop installation experience I have ever had for explaining the desktop features, themes, etc. Every desktop should look at that and copy it.
But the fact you have distribution X desktop as the fundamental balkanization of linux desktop continuing just makes me despair. The desktops should be striving for a unified experience across the distros to as much a degree as possible.
You've said the trigger words for my pet rant/ theory, sorry ;)
I dont know that the problem is balkanization on the front end: the window look and feel, etc.
There used to be one problem. Look and feel was horrible. Kind of the uncanny valley, where people coming from Windows or Solaris had to deal with a UI that was almost right but also wrong in dozens of tiny ways. And those were the good old days where all you had to do to switch was replace the path to your window manager in your X startup file.
Now we have two problems: the l&f is still weak across the board, with no stable UI/human interface standards nor a framework for designing themes that cover every part of the UI (ie users can skin their desktops and window chrome, but its always clunky, standards are low and even the best themes dont extend everywhere in the UI...shades of Windows' infamous Control Panel/Settings inconsistency here)
And secondly, changing desktop environments is incredibly ugly for users to do. Ripping out gnome for kde is fastest by simply reinstalling the OS. The hooks are so deep, the graphical decision you make when you download your install image is effectively immutable. Isnt it a little bizarre that fedora and ubuntu have to provide separate images simply because the desktop environment is different?
If I had a magic investment wand here, I would spend money on pro designers to spiff up the look and feel of a couple of desktop environments, like popOS does, and make them selectable at install time not download time. Id make switching trivially easy. And Id throw a boat load of money at defining a stable DE framework that resolved the kde gnome schism once and for all.
> And Id throw a boat load of money at defining a stable DE framework that resolved the kde gnome schism once and for all.
Even with a boatload of money, how would you go about this?
Write a shim lowest-common-demoninator API that can target both (like wxwidgets)?
Theme them to look like each other (like Qtcurve)?
Extract more and more individual concepts that can be collaborated on and shared (like fd.o / xdg-shell)?
I think the key problem is the proliferation of incompatible object extensions to C (C++ vs GObject and also Objective C). Porting GObject to C++ (like Gtkmm) is the most developed direction, the alternative of porting Qt to C/GObject (make all GObjects implement QObject or vice versa?) has not even been tried AFAICT.
For better or worse, I think that is basically the exact opposite of the *nix community’s modus operandi. The whole point of the free software movement is to be able to control/modify your own tools. Distros exist because different people have different priorities and viewpoints. The issue is that this discourages both developers and end users who want things to be consistent and reliable, and so they retreat to the Windows/Mac hegemony.
I run MATE on Debian. MATE has the right trade-offs for me. Not too heavy, not too light. GNOME seems to take more and more resources to do less and less. Icewm requires too much customisation. Icewm is an interesting wm. At first it has an ugly 90's retro aesthetic, but it grows on you after a little while. Switching back to "proper" DEs makes them look a little too sugary.
For me the killer failing of MATE is that it does not and cannot handle vertical taskbars right. GNOME 2 couldn't and MATE still can't.
(LXDE did; LXQt can't either. Sadly, it could before it reached v1.0 but it's now broken.)
Xfce does this with aplomb. In my testing (I wrote the article at the top of this thread) it is also substantially more stable; I regularly experience crashes in MATE.
The desktops should be striving for a unified experience across the distros to as much a degree as possible.
Really? How are you diminished if I say "meh...I'll just use xfce or cde". Or if there a user base that wants to use Xubuntu because, I dunno, it works better on lower resource machines? If the goal is to have only one true anointed holy Linux desktop we might as well just use Windows with WSL or something equally reductionist.
That was me 20 years ago, when I naively thought one would win out.
Nowadays I mostly use Apple, Microsoft and Google OS offerings, with GNU/Linux left for the server room, POSIX doesn't say anything about the desktop anyway.
I did a recent Ubuntu MATE install, and that was the best desktop installation experience I have ever had for explaining the desktop features, themes, etc. Every desktop should look at that and copy it.
But the fact you have distribution X desktop as the fundamental balkanization of linux desktop continuing just makes me despair. The desktops should be striving for a unified experience across the distros to as much a degree as possible.