[lj3]

Desktop Linux has bigger issues than UI toolkits. That's probably one of the reasons why you're having difficulty getting developers interested. I, personally, wouldn't contribute any time to a UI toolkit or desktop environment until some of the more egregious problems facing the linux desktop get resolved, if they ever can be.

There's an ugly catch-22 that's been playing itself out in the linux ecosystem for a while now. Linux drivers for modern hardware sucks, especially Wifi, video and audio cards. None of the manufacturers are willing to get serious about developing drivers for Linux until it gets more users and it can't get more users without better drivers. OS X was able to sidestep this problem by forming corporate partnerships with hardware manufacturers. They become far more willing to develop drivers for your system when it can buy them hardware sales. To date, nobody has decided to create a desktop based on Linux that has pockets deep enough to encourage the kind of development it needs.

[toyg]

> it can't get more users without better drivers

Drivers on Linux have always been like this, that's not the issue.

The real issue is that modern line-of-business application development (which is where the money is) has left the desktop for good. Windows has the same problem. It's not the Linux desktop that is dying, it's "the desktop" as a concept. Desktop vendors are sandboxing everything to death, for security reasons; and sandboxed apps are basically equivalent to a browser. More and more, the desktop is just a bootloader for browsers.

The only way out of this rut would require inventing something amazingly useful that is safe to share across desktop apps but not with browsers. The desktop needs something that appeals the mainstream and cannot be browserized. I don't expect Apple to ever come up with this (they love "browserization", it opened the market to their profitable mobile hardware), but Microsoft should really give it a go.

[pjmlp]

Windows desktop is doing just fine on the enterprise.

Lots of projects delivering WPF and Qt based applications, for those after them.

[lj3]

> Drivers on Linux have always been like this, that's not the issue.

What are you basing that on? Drivers on Linux have always been like this and Desktop Linux has always been DOA. OS X is a Linux based operating system that fixed this issue and linux users went to it in droves. You don't see the correlation?

> The real issue is that modern line-of-business application development (which is where the money is) has left the desktop for good.

I agree, the shrinking amount of money that can be made in the Desktop space is an issue. Or at least it's an issue that that's how people see it these days; microsoft is doing just fine with enterprise software licensing and I know more than a few $1M+ revenue line of business software businesses that are not saas based.

In any case, there is a solution for that: go the apple route and make the Linux Distro specifically for a new laptop. The state of laptop hardware these days sucks. It's all commodity junk, even the Thinkpads. Trying to push commodity hardware when the commodity crowd has gone to mobile is a losing strategy, as evidenced by decreasing sales year after year.

There's space for a high quality PC laptop that caters to the power user crowd, including a linux based OS with working drivers and a pleasant UI.

[toyg]

> OS X is a Linux based operating system that fixed this issue

OSX (which btw is based on BSD, not Linux) has been around for ages, but it wasn't that popular among developers until Apple moved to Intel, released the iPhone, and changed the laptop game with the MBA. That was the combo breaker, not the desktop.

> it's an issue that that's how people see it these days;

I agree, there is still good money in the desktop game; it's just that the margins on web are so eye-watering large, the market can't resist the temptation.

> go the apple route and make the Linux Distro specifically for a new laptop.

That would be nice, and it was sort-of tried by various entities at some point (Canonical + Dell, RedHat + IBM...), to be fair only with the commodity plasticky shit. Someone is trying it today with what are basically last year's MBPs (https://www.crowdsupply.com/purism/librem-15). The problem is that both Linux and hardware move so fast and so chaotically, long-term support is always an issue; today's graphic drivers might not be good enough for next year's chips, and tomorrow someone at RedHat might decide the audio stack should be rewritten for systemd, and so on and so forth.

And to be honest, the margins in the laptop game are clearly very thin. There is a reason Apple treats OSX as second fiddle to iOS and can't be bothered to refresh their MBPs as they used to.

[digi_owl]

> and tomorrow someone at RedHat might decide the audio stack should be rewritten for systemd

I can see it already, make pulseadio depend on logind under the banner of making audio device access "more secure".

[brusch64]

Which audio cards do you mean exactly ?

I'm pretty happy with most of the newer USB audio interfaces, as they happen to be more and more class compliant, so you don't need a seperate driver for it. I'm using the Presonus AudioBox 1818. It works fine with Linux, but I can't use the internal mixing engine. Would be fine if that worked, but is not that important for me.

What I really like about Linux drivers is that if they work, they won't get obsolete so quickly. I've had more luck with old supported hardware on Linux than on newer Windows versions. I also don't miss all the crapware that comes with some Windows drivers. I am looking at you Nvidia - I just want my monitor to work, I don't need 10 tools for my third monitor.

[lj3]

You name it, I've had issues with it. From the Intel audio card in my Thinkpad w530 to the Creative Soundblaster in my radio station's automation tower. I've never used a USB audio interface with Linux, but bluetooth audio on linux has a massive delay. In fairness, that delay is also present on OS X. For whatever reason, Windows is the only OS that will stream audio across bluetooth in real time.

It's possible the issue isn't with the audio drivers themselves but with PulseAudio and ALSA, which are both huge, steaming pile of shit. I just assumed PulseAudio and ALSA were both bad because of bad driver support and not because nobody in the linux ecosystem knows how to write an audio system.

[brusch64]

okay ?

I'm not using Bluetooth on my Linux PCs, so I can't comment on this.

The last audio problems I had with Linux was more than 6 years ago when I was using Ubuntu - it configured my soundcard on the PC wrong, was easily fixed. I am using Arch Linux in the last years and didn't have a problem with sound card drivers at all. Recording 16 tracks at the same time, mixing and using the HDMI or the analog Output on my media pc.

[digi_owl]

In large part because WinTel has driven the consumer computing margins so low, that OEMs have to rely on bundling to actually make a profit.