[gorkonsine]

UIs don't need to look the same, and there's no reason they should. Choice is a good thing. The problem, however, is a lack of interoperability: Gtk apps look like shit in KDE and vice-versa. There's no good reason for this; it's possible to make it so apps with different toolkits blend in seamlessly, but the Gnome devs are infamous for being completely unhelpful here and having a "our way or the highway" approach to everything.

>Because while you think gnome3 sucks if Canonical had their way everyone would be using it.

Not true; if Canonical had their way, everyone would be using Unity. Honestly, I don't begrudge them making Unity; it's good to have some diversity, but I do begrudge them switching to Gnome3 recently and abandoning Unity altogether. A lot of people liked Unity and its concepts. Instead of throwing in the towel and becoming yet another me-too Gnome3 distro, they could have adopted KDE, and then created a custom KDE theme or version of Plasma which looks and works like Unity and allows them to continue to explore those concepts which leveraging the existing KDE underpinnings and the superior Qt toolkit. The real problem IMO is the horrible Gtk toolkit: it's in C but bolts on a hacky OOP concept, it's undocumented, and it's constantly changing. I know of at least one commercial project which had to abandon it and switch to Qt because of the constant API deprecation, and there's at least one FOSS DE (Lxde I think) which also switched from Gtk to Qt for the same reasons, and got a performance boost in the process IIRC.

>the alternative is to stagnate with accepting what we have.

I can't even count the number of comments I've read from people who are sick and tired of the constant change and churn in Linux UIs. Lots of people were perfectly happy with Gnome2, but then it was deprecated and they were pushed to Gnome3 and it was terrible and they hated it. As a result, not 1 but 2 new DEs were created, just to satisfy people who wanted something more stable: Cinnamon and MATE. It's a complete mess. A lot of people were similarly pissed when KDE4.0 was released and they couldn't use KDE3 any more because the distros all deprecated it, and the new version was filled with huge bugs and didn't work. At some point, you need to aim for product maturity instead of constant churn. I've been using ssh for many, many years and I don't see that being deprecated any time soon and having to switch to some other standard, but somehow we're supposed to accept this as normal for DEs?

[sqeaky]

> everyone would be using Unity

3 months ago I would have agreed but they have announced that for their next LTS 18.04 they are dropping unity in favor of Gnome3.

I agree that improved interop would be good, but I am grateful for how well it does work. Copy/paste and other common shortcuts and features work. But, I use KDE and it sucks when I click something and it tries to open nautilus and clobbers my wallpaper. A "killall nautilus" later and everything is fine, but its annoying and a non-power user couldn't do this. The new the changed right click menu on the desktop would be really weird for the uninitiated too.

> I can't even count the number of comments I've read from people who are sick and tired of the constant change and churn in Linux UIs

It's not just Linux UIs Every UI is advancing; my friends and family are constantly asking me for help with win10 or whatever crazy mac/iOS/android shit they dig up. I explain I never used it, but I can form better google searches than them so I can figure out how to do what they need (I also don't mind this because I like learning this stuff too).

The root of this is how does a UI designer improve the UI while keeping it familiar enough for previous users? How do you keep power users and people on the cutting edge happy without losing the technophobic grandparents and those slow to learn?

[gorkonsine]

>3 months ago I would have agreed but they have announced that for their next LTS 18.04 they are dropping unity in favor of Gnome3.

No, it's still true. They didn't want to drop Unity at all; they did it because they were forced to. Didn't you read Mark Shuttleworth's blog postings about it? He was clearly unhappy about things. They gave up on Unity and Mir because they weren't working out in the market and it was costing them too much money to pursue that direction. If Mark had his way, Unity would be the most popular Linux DE.

>I use KDE and it sucks when I click something and it tries to open nautilus and clobbers my wallpaper.

Huh? I don't know what to say to this. Nautilus is Gnome software, not KDE. Why would KDE try to open Nautilus for anything, unless you've explicitly set it up that way? Now if that's what you've done because you like Nautilus, the problem is probably with the Gnome/Gtk devs. As I said before, they're infamous for not being amenable to cross-toolkit efforts. I would encourage you to ask them for their advice on this problem; they'll probably tell you "switch to Gnome3". :-/ I use KDE too, and personally I avoid GTK software if I can help it.

>A "killall nautilus" later and everything is fine, but its annoying and a non-power user couldn't do this.

I agree entirely. It's garbage, and it shouldn't be this way. The Gnome devs are entirely to blame for this mess, along with all the distros that push Gnome3. They don't even want you to use a wallpaper with Gnome3; Jon McCann said so some time ago, saying that customization (even wallpapers) is bad because it makes different Gnome installations different.

>It's not just Linux UIs Every UI is advancing; my friends and family are constantly asking me for help with win10 or whatever crazy mac/iOS/android shit they dig up.

Oh I entirely agree; all the UI people across the industry have gone collectively nuts. But I expect better from FOSS, for multiple reasons: 1) FOSS isn't for-profit (well, I guess Red Hat is, maybe that's part of the problem), so they shouldn't need to push unnecessary churn to justify pushing customers to "upgrade", and 2) FOSS is usually very resource-limited compared to commercial software, so unnecessary churn is a waste of developer time that's better spent fixing bugs, improving docs, making things more stable, etc. If I want to use the latest fancy BS, it would stand to reason that I'd go for commercial proprietary SW, because those vendors are all in favor of making "new" shiny stuff to get me to spend more money to do the same thing. The same shouldn't also be true of FOSS, but for some reason it seems to be.

>I also don't mind this because I like learning this stuff too

I don't. I consider it all an unnecessary waste, and I really don't like these new UIs at all. Thankfully I'm still stuck on Win7 at work for the moment, and minimize my use of Windows whenever possible as I do most of my work in a Linux VM (and don't use it at home at all), and I never even see any Macs up close. I put up with Android because it's the best of 2 bad choices, but also IMO it's not that bad: it's a touch UI designed for a handheld touchscreen device and it's OK at that, unlike PC stuff that they seem to be trying to tablet-ify.

>How do you keep power users and people on the cutting edge happy without losing the technophobic grandparents and those slow to learn?

Whatever it is, the answer isn't trying to tablet-ify PCs, or using garish and nauseating color schemes. Everyone was doing just fine with the WinXp-7 style UI for the most part, and why do we care about grandparents? Today's grandparents were using Win95 and XP, so they're perfectly used to that kind of UI. Grandparents today are not starting to use computers for the first time; that was 10-20 years ago. Anyone left now who isn't familiar with PCs to some extent isn't going to be alive for very long, and isn't interested in learning PCs now. And most older people with simple needs would be perfectly happy with an iPad or other tablet anyway, which is why the PC market is no longer growing.

[sqeaky]

> Nautilus is Gnome software, not KDE. Why would KDE try to open Nautilus for anything

It wasn't KDE software opening nautilus. It was random 3rd party software that decided to launch nautilus instead of asking what it should have launched.

> Everyone was doing just fine with the WinXp-7

Sounds like someone who never worked on a help desk. There is someone new using a computer for the first time everyday. I would be confident this was true even if it were just grandparents, but there are poor subsistence farmers settling into cities and luddites turned everyday. I think you are letting your tiny view (we all have a tiny view) of the world make you think that every hold a decent professional job in a decent western and industrial nation.

And no matter how much you long for it the past is not coming back and any UI that requires clicking "start" to shutdown is in wastebin and rightfully so.

[gorkonsine]

>any UI that requires clicking "start" to shutdown is in wastebin and rightfully so.

Citation needed. Windows 10 still requires this, they just don't label the button "start" any more (nor does any other UI I've seen in the last 10 years). Mechanically, it's basically the same.

[sqeaky]

The win 10 is an all around mess and the typical user gets ads in their start menu.

It still has a few dialog from the nt4 era, some that use the snap-in nonsense, regedit is still a thing. Then for about half of what a typical user does they can use the nice pretty UI, as long as there are no unexpected errors.

[sethrin]

> somehow we're supposed to accept this as normal for DEs?

No, but it is the normal result of an open source development process. Being able to fork at any time is exactly why the fragmentation exists. Don't like it? Use a commercial product.

[sqeaky]

I think it is even more extreme. It is the normal result of having multiple teams making UIs. Each team is going to try things that are different.

Consider how different the iPhone and windows 10 are. Or windows 7 and windows 8. Because the community driven teams don't stop when they run out of money they stick around, but they also have really small marketshare.

[gorkonsine]

The problem is too many people with too much time on their hands. For the commercial teams, they're in-place and receiving a paycheck, so their managers want to make themselves and their teams look like they justify their salaries, so they come up with New!! stuff to do. For the FOSS people, it's partly the same: the Gnome3 devs are largely employed by Red Hat. For others serving in a volunteer, it's a lack of discipline and too much time on their hands which could be used for more productive stuff (like documentation, fixing bugs, etc.).

[sqeaky]

You imply being able to write code for fun in your leisure time is bad, but so many great things have come out of leisure time.

[gorkonsine]

Writing code in leisure time has given us some really great FOSS applications. But like many things, it's a double-edged sword: it's also given us Gnome3 and a lot of today's unnecessary churn. However, unlike little 1-man projects, Gnome3 isn't just a leisure-time project, it's largely led by paid developers at Red Hat. So honestly, I'd say that the volunteers really aren't the problem, and if you eliminated the salaries of the Gnome devs working for RH, maybe we wouldn't have some of these problems; the volunteers aren't going to sustain all that effort on their own. The commonality I see with UI churn across the industry (proprietary and FOSS) is that UI people are being paid to do UI work. That means they have to justify their pay and their existence by doing more such work, even when it isn't needed and it's downright bad.