[neilalexander]

This is an argument I hear a lot in places like HN by power users but almost never by anyone else anywhere else. Put technical people aside for one moment, how is a novice supposed to “choose the desktop” they use? How are they supposed to “customise the baked-in design”?

I believe that the average user at home or at work values consistency, intuitiveness and attractiveness far more than the potential for customisation. They need the user interface to be clear and explicit, they need patterns that are repeatable and easy to remember and they need to not hate looking at it. They need to feel confident enough that they can either guess how it works or to reuse some knowledge they already have learned from elsewhere on the system.

Customisation is so often touted as the be-all-and-end-all solution to outright deficiencies in design — if you don’t like it, just do this and this and this and this — but that totally misses the point because then the underlying problems never get solved. Just look at the significant behavioural differences between apps built in Qt, Gtk, Electron, wxWidgets, …