[JetSetWilly]

Why does "being a programmer" mean that I don't want my usb key to automount? Why does "being a programmer" mean that I should want to hack my desktop environment? Maybe I want to work on my own stuff, and have a desktop that works?

Maybe I don't want to have to read Learn You a Haskell to configure my window manager. Maybe I hate the whole concept of tiling window managers because I like to have overlapping windows?

You are making a lot of assumptions about what other people should want to spend their time on. I don't want to waste time or brainpower coding xmonad or dwm to behave in a way that doesn't annoy me, and manually setting up a bunch of basic infra like automounting USB keys, when I can just use KDE which doesn't annoy me by default.

[spain]

>Why does "being a programmer" mean that I don't want my usb key to automount? Why does "being a programmer" mean that I should want to hack my desktop environment? Maybe I want to work on my own stuff, and have a desktop that works?

I agree, it really doesn't. Just look at Linus Torvalds for example. Some people asked him at a recent DebConf [0] what he thought of Debian and Linux distributions and his reply was basically "Oh I don't really care about distributions or systemd, I just wanna install it and get on with my life (i.e. the kernel)".

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Mg5_gxNXTo

[digi_owl]

And when he has to care he has enough clout that yelling about it online get it fixed asap. As was seen when he ranted about his daughter needing the root password to change wifi settings.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Linux has always been the equivalent of a discussion forum with opinions expressed in code.

Everyone has an opinion about Technology X/Y/Z, often strongly held.

But you can't make a usable desktop OS out of opinions. You need a big-picture long-term strategy. There doesn't seem to be a lot of that in most of distro world.

Server Linux has done better because the problem space is (kind of...) smaller and better defined, so strategies and innovations have appeared, and there are clear goals to work towards.

Consumer Linux is like a military campaign advancing in all directions. Everyone is working on something, but - beyond development for development's sake - it's not at all obvious why.

[microtonal]

I think there was a window of time where this was not true and the majority (user-wise) of the Linux desktop was really strong, united, and standardized. This lasted approximately from the mid-2000s until GNOME 3 and Unity.

- Ubuntu had a polished GNOME 2 desktop.

- Red Hat Enterprise Linux had a polished GNOME 2 desktop.

- SUSE Enterprise Linux had a polished GNOME 2 desktop.

They were also using pretty much the same components. Since then, we had the MATE/GNOME 3/Unity/Cinnamon split and the upcoming X.org/Wayland/Mir split.

[digi_owl]

I find myself wondering if things started going to hell when https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Linux happened. Since then RH seems to have been on the warpath.

[XorNot]

I'm skeptical Mir is going to be a serious split, and even then it'll be Mir/Wayland - both of those will still run X.Org apps via shim-servers, same way Mac OS does.

[Shorel]

I seem to recall SUSE being a RPM based distribution but with KDE instead of Gnome.

[microtonal]

Their enterprise distributions were very much centered around GNOME. Remember that this is when they still had Xamarin.

[DanBC]

I agree that many people want their machine to just work so they can work on actual work, not on fixing the OS.

I don't know how the solution to that is the buggy mess of, for example, Gnome on Fedora20 which is a buggy mess.