> I visit this comment section for the same reason I visit a zoo.
Before making offensive comments, have you thought about the meaning of my statement?
For example, a modern DE offers desktop notifications. I still have that by running a desktop notification daemon, dunst, despite just using X plus a window manager but no DE.
Linux is very much broken into small composable components, the same way Clojure is. To take this comparison further, it is extremely ignorant to claim you can't have the same functionality Rails offers just because you don't use a big framework (which is the equivalent to a DE).
I feel like this argument would be moot if all had the same understanding of the terms they were using. People seem bit hazy on what that the term desktop environment actually describes.
My car has a roof, it just wasn't chosen for me by someone at MS/Apple/Gnome/KDE. A custom hand-built car is not necessarily more primitive than a factory-standard one, or any less appealing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html