[cbolton]

For me it's the opposite: why do we have a gazillion of window managers (that just manage windows), and so few desktop environments that provide a complete and coherent setup?

It's especially annoying in the world of tiling window managers. There are few options for a desktop environment with a solid tiling WM. Regolith is one (based on i3 / Sway), and I thank those who develop it, but it's patching together a bunch of independently developed tools and you can tell when you try to change some things and have to deal with disparate config files.

[jwells89]

Totally agree. I tinkered around with an openbox+tint2 setup several years ago and was able to get it to a usable state, but getting all the little things working is so fussy and flaky, with e.g. the need to hunt down suitable daemons to get a typical tray item loadout.

[qwerty456127]

Imagine a perfect world where all the separate apps just were coherent, forming a complete ecosystem and their config files were not disparate? So you would just pick a window manager you somehow like better, a panel app of your choice, launcher, sound volume, WiFi management, calculator applets you prefer... Then switch to another window manager someday... keeping everything else intact. This is the way it's meant to be, every thing you dislike is just a quirk.

[cbolton]

Yes that sounds awesome, though I'd prefer having a single config file for the window manager, status bar, notifications, application launcher, lock screen and whatever else I forgot that are in the end part of the same experience.

One particular problem is theming: I'd like to set a theme in a single place for all the elements of my desktop environment. Not sure if it's fair to expect a bunch of independent opinionated developers who like to use weird graphics toolkits (when not drawing everything by themselves) to come up with a unified solution.

Another problem is the shortcuts. It's the same problem in (neo)vim when you build your awesome IDE-like setup based on 53 unrelated packages: you end up with an illogical, overlapping soup of keybindings. I think you need someone to take charge of unifying things to provide a coherent experience.

[xn--cr8h]

Nobody actually has time for all that

[benrutter]

Yeah this, there really isn't a strong coherent option for tiling window managers just yet. We'll probably see one soon with cosmic.

I think its the vim effect where the userbase just has a high demand for customization and don't mind a lot more set up and configuration to get there.