>Pop!OS ships with an opinionated desktop called "Cosmic", which is based on GNOME and makes several breaking changes to customize the desktop for their specifi

>Pop!OS ships with an opinionated desktop called "Cosmic", which is based on GNOME and makes several breaking changes to customize the desktop for their specific use case. That doesn't mean a new DE is the solution and if the idea you floated was that DE don't matter, its irrelevant to anything that would help linux adaption. >They're transitioning from a bloated set of patches to a much smaller, faster codebase. I fail to see how this is a downgrade. They could also contribute to another DE. Its going to be better in some ways, inferior in others, have less features than existing DE, some distros will support it and it'll be another DE in the sea of DE that aren't as popular as GNOME/KDE that needs its own community to support it. What is this an upgrade from? They could rewrite GTK2 in rust, use something stable like MATE, rewrite that in rust, but they want to make a new DE, for what benefit over a fork or rewriting and contributing to a project that could use more help over redoing what others have done? >Well, neither is less DE. There is no shortage of DE that need contributors and help, imagine if this was still the attitude of Android, to fragment it by flooding it with UIs and custom skins that that didn't work with others. You therefore get zombie phones with features nobody supports. Do you actually think that more DE with less functions versus a few DE with more functions is better? Becuse that is the current state and its a failure and deterrrant to desktop linux. Nobody wants to switch to linux, get less features and need several programs to do what one would do. Again, what program replaces photoshop? Do you think people needing several programs with less features is not a fragmentation problem and its the best approach? >You're driving a false equivalency. On my distro (and most distros marketed towards new users), you can just use your built-in software manager to grab the package from official repos. In just about every distribution I've ever used, there was a GUI that allowed you to interface with your package manager, no command line required. The binaries would have to be compiled for it, which is why package managers matters, unless you are saying that all package managers have all the packages and there is no difference with support. >TL:DR - Linux has a lot of problems, but fragmentation is not one of them, nor can it ever be fixed. Fragmentation is a huge issue and why theres a million distros that people freeze on switching, the most successful linux is Android and they fixed it, and its the most successful. I don't know why you keep ignoring this point.