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I am relatively tolerant of minor UI issues, but I think the kernel doesn't have this problem for reasons that will probably never translate to desktop environm

I am relatively tolerant of minor UI issues, but I think the kernel doesn't have this problem for reasons that will probably never translate to desktop environment development. It is a much more difficult to maintain a different kernel than it is a different desktop environment. So there is a huge incentive to cooperate on one kernel, even among companies with wildly different concerns (e.g. embedded IoT devices vs. cloud servers). The kernel is also developed with an entirely different support culture than, say, Gnome. Backward compatibility for all supported use cases is taken extremely seriously by kernel developers. If it works on today's Linux kernel you can be almost assured it will work in 5 or 10 years. So, kernel users (i.e. developers, distro maintainers, etc.) stay happy because their stuff doesn't break. Contrast this with the more "opinionated" DEs and you see features yanked and changed at a comparably dizzying rate. So, DE users experience a rate of change and support dynamic that is actually much "worse" than kernel users do.

md8z 5y ago
As someone who has been hacking on desktop stuff for a while, I totally disagree with your comment. Maintaining a different desktop is a massive undertaking. The total amount of lines of code in GNOME or KDE is comparable to the lines of code in the kernel. It is no joke to make a new desktop environment, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. It's not just a matter of take GNOME and replace the window manager and then you're done. But I suspect that is what System76 will start with and then they'll see how much money they can raise from that. (Probably not much if Purism is any indication) Backwards compatibility to the kernel only matters to the syscall API. There are areas of the kernel that get quite a lot of churn. Or things such as obsolete/unmaintained drivers and architectures getting removed. But nobody complains about those because it only matters to driver developers or other low-level people like the systemd maintainers. And when something broken does make it into mainline, the few people who get affected by those drivers who do complain get told "too bad, there is no money/time to fix it, buy new hardware or pay a support vendor" or something like that. You know, the usual thing you hear from any open source project. I really don't see how the support culture is much different. I know it's common for people to call out GNOME but I never understood any of the complaints there, you can still grab GTK1 and GTK2 and compile them if you really want to use those, as bad an idea as it may be. Those are about as unmaintained and crufty as any of the older areas in the kernel, and they're still technically around.

md8z 5y ago

As someone who has been hacking on desktop stuff for a while, I totally disagree with your comment. Maintaining a different desktop is a massive undertaking. The total amount of lines of code in GNOME or KDE is comparable to the lines of code in the kernel. It is no joke to make a new desktop environment, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. It's not just a matter of take GNOME and replace the window manager and then you're done. But I suspect that is what System76 will start with and then they'll see how much money they can raise from that. (Probably not much if Purism is any indication) Backwards compatibility to the kernel only matters to the syscall API. There are areas of the kernel that get quite a lot of churn. Or things such as obsolete/unmaintained drivers and architectures getting removed. But nobody complains about those because it only matters to driver developers or other low-level people like the systemd maintainers. And when something broken does make it into mainline, the few people who get affected by those drivers who do complain get told "too bad, there is no money/time to fix it, buy new hardware or pay a support vendor" or something like that. You know, the usual thing you hear from any open source project. I really don't see how the support culture is much different. I know it's common for people to call out GNOME but I never understood any of the complaints there, you can still grab GTK1 and GTK2 and compile them if you really want to use those, as bad an idea as it may be. Those are about as unmaintained and crufty as any of the older areas in the kernel, and they're still technically around.