[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.