[grumpyprole]

It's worse than that. The desktop efforts are heavily fragmented and arguably the leader, RedHat's "Gnome", while quite polished, is actually quite user hostile (e.g. works very differently to anything else, perhaps to dodge patents; and constantly changes/removes popular features). Linux needs to have a standardised "platform" with stable APIs.

[techrat]

Good luck getting anyone to agree on anything.

It's why everything is so fragmented to begin with. "Oh, I don't like what X is doing, so I'll fork it and make Y."

If I were in a position where I managed several distros... I could say we could just suck it up and universally use XFCE, but then there's always someone who won't like that and they'll respin a distro to have some other DE instead.

It seems with every decision we end up with another fork.

[michaelmrose]

XFCE is honestly a mediocre middle ground between the actual minimalism of a window manager or the better functionality of say kde.

Most fragmentation is actually entirely different software with the same end goal as opposed to actual forks and it's not really clear that the developer of foo would have joined forces with the developer of bar had he not started his own project.

[techrat]

Like I said, good luck getting anyone to agree on anything.

[gentleman11]

It’s not user hostile, I love gnome. It might slow down if you don’t reboot (could be a hibernation or suspend issue?) but the Ux is great. Windows is a nuisance after using gnome. You do need to install some addons that should be built in

[grumpyprole]

I could not find any add-on (that still works) to give me back my tray icons. Not even Apple would take this feature away.