I’m not proposing anything here, I’m curious what you all think of the future.
What is your vision for what you want Linux to be?
I often read about wanting a smooth desktop experience like on MacOS, or having all the hardware and applications supported like Windows, or the convenience of Google products (mail, cloud storage, docs), etc.
A few years ago people were talking about convergence of phone/desktop, i.e. you plug your phone into a big screen and keyboard and it’s now your desktop computer. That’s one vision. ChromeOS has its “everything is in the cloud” vision. Stallman has his vision where no matter what it is, the most important part is that it’s free software.
If you could decide the future of personal computing, what would it be?
Whatever it is I hope we don’t end up “selling out” for a higher market share. KDE is proof that you can have stability while also having infinite configuration options. Gnome seems to be openly hostile to any other way of doing things that isn’t the gnome way.
I don’t mind gnome existing but it isn’t for me and I hope I don’t get forced into using something that I can’t modify to meet my workflow wishes. I’m seeing a lot more programs being written without prioritizing being desktop agnostic. I think we can forge our own path making a desktop that is both as stable as Mac OS and as approachably configurable as Linux should be.
Part of the great Linux experience is the ability to have competing projects with differing philosophies. Part of infinite configuration choices includes the choice of installing GNOME instead of KDE (or one of the dozens of other DEs and WMs).
Personally I much prefer the GNOME design ethos over KDE; I am not one of life’s desktop tweakers, and my Linux experience would be much diminished if that’s all there was. But I’m glad KDE exists for those users who like that sort of thing.
There are some very crazy looking Gnome customizations in the unixporn community. At a glance they look like a custom window manager setups, not sure how well it performs though.
Well my point is that Gnome can be customizable just not as straightforward as KDE.