| People naming distros like it's 4chan from 20 years ago. Redhat and Gentoo. Oh my. Linux Mint, Pop, and more, all now provide "Windows without MS" which is what most users really want/need. Even with gaming now that Steam has multiple ways to run on Linux. You can put grandpa in front of some Linux boxes today and he won't notice the difference. Debian, BSD, etc. I totally get you want the most stable thing going. You like to pretend that memorizing arcane spells for 20 years is the same as intuitive. I get it. I run some remote stuff on a BSD box. I don't know a single serious command without a lookup. But it's stable. I thank the guy who made a cheat sheet for common commands. Even on the security front though, the tinfoils are doing weird containerized OSes and stuff now. Opening a browser tab can spawn a whole sandboxed OS in seconds. Your pitifully out of date Debian repo doesn't really stack up anymore. Basically. You can run a modern OS that doesn't suck to use. And that OS can be Linux. With Windows 10+ poised to drive many away from MS, distros need to get with the times and be ready for the masses. Or. "Serious users will move to X" is a bad argument from the 1990s. Newbies have an OS that pros can enjoy. And if I want to run Debian, I can fire it up in a sandbox or whatever. It's the 21st century. It's not like I have to wait for physical media to spin up to install a live copy. |
This is a big reason why macos sucks for example - it does everything its own way. The keyboard, the dock, the app structure, the apis, the menu bar. It's all non-transferable.
I agree that "Windows without MS" is generally the desired state of a UI BUT which Windows? XP style? 7? 10? 11? Windows itself isn't consistent with the Windows UI.
How's the goal of using a UI that re-uses learned behaviors going? UI changes far more than CLI. X11 to Wayland, KDE3 to 4 to 6. Gnome 2 to 3 to 40... it's a real struggle to keep your UI the way you like it. You will be forced by external pressures to adopt a new UI at some point. As much as I loved Firefox 3 and Opera 11, they're impossible to use on the modern web and so I must use the new and worse UI of modern firefox or vivaldi.
But through this entire history I just presented, has "cp" changed? "ls"? Yes, they aren't intuitive. But none of the above is. Yet, they did not change, so they are learned once and reused until the end of time.
Yet, in the CLI world, what did change? init to systemd, alsa to pulse to pipewire, and more. That stuff is just as annoying, and it's nice that debian does not stagnate but does not advance too quickly here either.