> I recently gave every Linux DE an honest test drive and... it's clear that nobody really has the resources to perfect them. That's not strictly true. The re

> I recently gave every Linux DE an honest test drive and... it's clear that nobody really has the resources to perfect them. That's not strictly true. The resources were (and are) there, but they have been pointlessly squandered. KDE3 and GNOME2 were great desktop environments. I would argue that KDE3 was the pinnacle of all desktop environments to date. Polished and usable, it was absolutely fantastic to use. Great UI, great design, and having KParts embedded in Konqueror made it really flexible and extensible. I used it for many years, and took advantage of its functionality unlike any other DE. I also used GNOME since the 0.9x days, and it also became very polished, if not less sophisticated overall. GNOME2 was definitely its peak. What happened though was CADT. All the effort expended to build up these DEs was carelessly torn down to be rebuilt in an inferior form. Today, both of the major DEs seem to be busy aping mobile UIs instead of creating desktop UIs. GNOME/GTK have scrollbars with zero buttons and sized about 4px wide; totally unusable on a 4K display. They even broke the old paging and panning behaviours, which were excellent. They have almost completely lost their focus on the desktop, and with it, the developer base which formed the long tail of contributors. Part of the problem is that the upcoming generation of developers have predominantly known mobile UIs; they haven't fully experienced or understood the sheer breadth and depth of rich desktop UIs. The other is that with the switch to mobile devices, there simply isn't the money in desktop UIs nowadays. While this isn't strictly a bad thing, in practice it's the loss of diverse commercial inputs which has driven GNOME off the rails and made it an insular echo chamber of bad ideas.