[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? (...)