[that_guy_iain]

The real issue, macos has one distribution, Windows has one distribution, Linux has so many I doubt anyone really keeps track. The issue with Linux is they’re working in fragments instead of as one. The problem is oss not the operating system but the culture it was developed in.

[zarkov99]

I don't know. I understand what you are saying, but if there was just one Linux desktop it would almost certainly have to be tailored to the lowest common denominator user and it would end up just being a less polished MacOC version. The fragmentation forces some degree of interoperability which enables more specialized and innovative approaches, like tilling window managers,functional package managers, weird shell languages. In other words, the fragmentation might be an innovation and specialization enabling feature, rather than a bug.

[lbriner]

I guess the theory is open competition and whoever builds the best thing gets all the market and everything else dies. The only problem with that is that if you have spent years developing something, especially if you weren't paid for it, you are not likely to want to accept defeat and lose your investment.

Maybe the way to sort this is to create Linux groups around certain topics like graphics or music production and then the people with the specific skills can contribute to multiple applications at the same time (at least their design work). This way, if one product dies, their work lives on in other products.

[encryptluks2]

This isn't really a bad thing. There are lot of enterprisey distros that I absolutely despise the package management and culture. If they all operated under one I can only imagine how political the whole process would be to get anything accomplished.

[pjmlp]

In the mid-90's, I had hope that GNU/Linux would eventually evolve into either GNOME or KDE as the main desktop environment with their frameworks filling the same role as Kits in OS X, BeOS, WinAPI.

Instead, it is not only the distributions, the whole desktop stacks keep being re-invented way more that what Apple or Microsoft have done thus far.

Then there are the whole set of GNOME and KDE forks from those not happy with those reboots.

Not a surprise that only ChromeOS and Android have managed to have stuck as desktop/mobile variants of Linux based OSes.

So those are the only "desktop" Linux that I ended up caring about.

[ldiracdelta]

I don't care about window transitions and compiz fusion or anything flashy about my window manager anymore. Xfce. Happy camper since 2015 as my main dev environment. Just run my programs please and provide some easy tools to position multiple windows.

[pjmlp]

You might not care, but everyone that doesn't want to be yet another Electron developer cares about the developer stack available across all desktops.

Since that is too much effort, you just get Electron apps instead.