[linguafranca]

Am I the only one who is frustrated by the plethora of desktop environments available for Linux? Why not just have just a single, highly extensible desktop environment instead? Is there any sane reason for having so many[1] mainstream DEs?

[1]: Gnome, KDE, XFDE, LXDE, are the ones I know off the top of my head

[nisa]

> Why not just have just a single, highly extensible desktop environment instead?

I'll likely get flak for this but that's what KDE is (or could be). KParts¹ is great. Just press F4 in Dolphin. Drag And Drop works quite well. It's the only DE where i managed to get a unified look between GTK2/3 and QT.

It's sane² and build on Qt/C++. No crazy gobject or GTK3 problems.

The only problem is that Plasma/Oxygen is just terrible and scares users away². Once you configure it away KDE is great². Also they did not a favour to themselves by including Akonadi and that semantic desktop stuff in a way that will hog memory and kill latency when using a disk³. You can scare away the friendliest Linux user when you start an MySQL instance in userspace on logon and feed that with a invasive disk-indexer.

Maybe I'm just a disgruntled KDE user.. it could really be a fine default desktop system.

1: https://techbase.kde.org/Development/Architecture/KDE4/KPart...

2: YMMV

3: Hi there! I'm nepomuk/bamboo! I'm doing millions of seeks on your disk and crash randomly on the documents I've found. Don't worry. I'm not slow! Must be your fault! It's still slow? Really? (...)

[danford]

Horrible idea.

If you tried to unify them you would have one bloated piece of crap or a desktop 90% of people hate.

I like having the choice between a few good DEs. What I don't understand is why Apple or Microsoft have yet to create a DE that is really better than something from the open source community. Sure each desktop is better at somethings than others, but it's hard to say that the ones that are being developed for proprietary OS's are objectively better than their open source counter-parts. You would think putting all your eggs in one basket would allow you to create a "super OS". Guess not.

[scrollaway]

All these DEs are giving the users options. The DEs themselves try to organize between each other to make sure devs don't have to write apps twenty times to support the different DEs, which sometimes isn't done fast enough. But the fact that users have a choice between many different DEs, with very different philosophies, is excellent.

KDE is for people who like configuration options. GNOME is for people who prefer simplicity. LXDE is for those looking for a lightweight DE that doesn't get in the way. Cinnamon is for those who like OSX but want to stay on Linux. XFCE is for the truly minimalists out there. Etc.

What would "one single highly extensible DE" bring? It'd just be a name. A desktop environment is a few things: - A core session manager. This stuff is common to all DEs and works pretty much the same for all. - A set of core apps for desktop management (eg desktop, panel, system settings) - Desktop apps. They're just apps. Some DEs don't ship any, some ship a hundred. They generally don't require you to run the DE alongside them, they're just built by the same people in the same spirit.

So tell me, what would your ideal desktop environment bring to the table, exactly?

[andmarios]

So why don't you create the SHE DE (single, highly extensible desktop environment)? Then we will have KDE, GNOME, XFCE, LXDE, SHEDE, etc. :)

[umanwizard]

Am I the only one who is frustrated by the plethora of operating systems available for x86? Why not just have just a single, highly customizable and secure desktop operating system instead? Is there any sane reason for having so many[1] mainstream OSs?

[1]: FreeBSD, GNU/Linux, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Windows, Minix, OSX, Solaris, are the ones I know off the top of my head

[tom9729]

Problem is that not everyone agrees on what that means, or if that is a good thing. Gnome is getting less and less extensible, while KDE is almost too extensible. LXDE is focused on low resource usage, and I'm not sure what XFCE's goal is. There is also the toolkit schism (GTK vs Qt) to take into account.

[joeyh]

Gnome, KDE, XFCE, LXDE, MATE, Cinnamon, Unity. I find this list beyond frustrating, and verging on absurd.

I tend to think of this as the lack of pipes problem. Every unix tool can be piped into or out of every other tool, and so combined with absolute freedom -- perhaps too much freedom. The choice of shell used to do it barely matters, and can be swapped out easily, so we don't have to ask at install time if the user wants bash or zsh or fish. The desktop developers have not come up with a flexible unifying abstraction (and some even seem to be throwing out the few abstractions available, like separate window manager programs) and so are stuck either imitating the past, or fragmenting in a ceaseless, aimless desire for the new and shiny.

[sroerick]

I use i3.

I don't think I'll ever go back to a floating window manager, tiling is just way too efficient.

[zanny]

Gnome is practically only usable through extensions. If you want an example of Gnome 3 done right, look at Zorin - which is a Gnome reskin designed to emulate modern Windows.

Likewise, KDE is highly modular and configurable - you can develop whatever widgets you want and drop them in wherever you want. That is how they now have a mobile and desktop variant of Plasma. And the configuration means you can do everything from featureless software rendered uncomposited desktop to exploding windows and spinning cubes in OpenGL.

The thing is highly extensible means more space use, and LXDE / XFCE in part originate in a desire for smaller footprint installs. They also use less memory on average, albeit the usage of Gnome / KDE and them is minute relative to modern memory footprints (XFCE might use 100MB, KDE sans semantic desktop search might use 200).