The one area where I don't advocate for GNU/Linux is in graphical user interfaces. The year of the Linux desktop will never come. For whatever reason, the cathedral can make a much better GUI than the bazaar.
> the cathedral can make a much better GUI than the bazaar.
Can is such an open ended claim it's impossible to judge (there's always another tomorrow). But does? Not so sure. I've used the big 3 extensively. I don't buy into the dafter reaches of Linux advocacy ("your great-grandmother could install it & have no problems & it's way easier than ...). But OTOH the annoyances I get from running Fedora as my main machine are at least no greater than I've had with Windows and MacOS. I prefer it because its balance of positives and negatives suit my preferences best; but I don't find any of the 3 main desktop OS's categorically superior. Admittedly that's because they're all pretty dismal. Every unhappy OS is unhappy in its own way. And every desktop OS is unhappy.
The year of the Linux desktop came for me in the early '00s. Since then, I find that there has been some improvements here and there but an overall general decline in usability and quality for desktop systems with GUIs.
To each their own.
Edit: Had my dates wrong at first, in case you caught it for that minute.
They can, yet the hoards of migrations that keep being announced since Windows XP never come true, regardless how bad Apple, Microsoft and Google might release some of their OSes.
Hardware support imo is pretty good on Linux, if not better than on OS X/Windows. Especially legacy hardware.
In themselves, each desktop is OK, the problem is that the UI experience is fragmented across several different toolkits (i.e. gtk, qt, etc) so it doesn't look consistent.
Windows and Mac do not have this problem.
The other problem is that a client-server architecture is inefficient for a locally rendered UI.
Maybe true, but interestingly, Linux is about 10% of laptop market share (7.5% ChromeOS/ChromiumOS, 2.5% Linux), already fairly successful. (And ChromeOS can and does run Linux applications now.)
I don't consider ChromiumOS to be GNU/Linux. The kernel itself doesn't count -- obviously the kernel has little to do with the user experience. Android is much different than the experience of an X11/Gnome or KDE desktop. The graphics stack is entirely different.
Preferences are preferences, but mine would be Cinnamon DE.
Simple, fast, lots of functionality. Reminds me of all the best parts of Windows XP and the focus is on tasks/programs and not full-screen apps like modern Gnome.
And almost as lightweight as FVWM (not quite, but closer than most mainstream DEs).
Pretty sure you're talking about something else. KDE is famous for being the most configurable desktop within at least 4.24 light years, probably much more.
It’s configurable yes, but it has plenty of quirks and bits of design that can’t be changed without getting one’s hands dirty and forking. Those are what people will likely find disagreeable, more than anything that can be changed.
