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As someone who uses one of the minority desktops within a minority distro (Fedora w/ Cinnamon spin), I agree that all of the trash-talking within a community is to the detriment to its spread.

I almost wish we could get all Linux users to verbally agree to something like the following:

"I will not trash popular Linux desktop environments to outsiders. Ubuntu is fine. GNOME is fine. I understand that for the sake of the Linux Desktop's survival, it is more important that I be helpful and supportive of people's choice to use Default Ubuntu, rather than telling them that my Arch/Xfce/i3 setup is The One True Path."

Use whatever you want in private. Just shut the f--- up about trashing Ubuntu/Mint/Manjaro at every opportunity because you disagree with some decision of theirs. It makes us all look bad.

I think you misunderstood : the problem is not the trash-talking, the problem is that all Linux DE are trashes and if people were only putting their effort on one it wouldn't be trash.

Everyone thinks that different part of it is trash, so you get 20 desktop. Its like in that xkcd where you creat ultimate desktop and end up with 21 desktops instead of original 20.

And why would Linux need Such desktop-to-end-all-other-desktops? It would be a trashy configure me only with mouse desktop. Let such users stay at Windows or Mac and allow power users to have their choice if 20 desktops with majority of them allowing at least a text configuration.

GNOME isn't fine. See, on switching keyboard layout it switches focus from current window while it writes some file to disk. Yes, it's not terrible on SSD, and I bet whoever invented this monstrosity has an SSD. But needing an SSD not to lose some of the letters you type just screams of insanity.

OTOH, yes, the rest of Ubuntu is fine, and to anyone fed up with Windows I gladly recommend anything else based on Ubuntu LTS. [LKX]Ubuntu, Ubuntu MATE, Mint — they are all really fine.

How often does a user switch their keyboard layout?

When writing in Russian, every time when they switch between typing prose and typing equations or code. So, maybe about a dozen times per sentence.

At first my jaw dropped on your comment, but then I thought, maybe we non-latin-writing people are just abusing a feature meant for something different? Do you use several layouts, but switch between them infrequently?

Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if people assume that non-latin languages have all the characters you need to type in that language on a single layout. For English at least, you really only use a single layout.

In various non-european scenarios, possibly multiple times per sentence. For example, including the word "Microsoft" or "Linux" in the middle of non-latin script requires two keyboard layout switches, to latin and back.

I code on US keyboard, but i write mails and documentation for work on Slovenian keyboard.

It's not bad if you focus on one or the other. But when you combine the two, (talking about techical stuf, tickets, code reviews, ...) I often have to switch.

I'd say i switch on average few dozen times per hour.

Huh? So? Surprisingly, Ubuntu MATE has bugs too, you can look here too see some of them: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-mate

1) This bug is a major one for a big part of the world.

2) It belongs to the part of GNOME that exists solely because GNOME decided to reinvent keyboard input.

3) Google shows lots of people aware of the problem (bugreports, stackexchange, whatever) — of course it does, see (1) — but not only no solution, but also I couldn't find any workaround short of using another DE, although — see (2) — disabling the feature altogether would be a decent workaround.

Of course all programs have bugs. Do other free programs tend to have bugs of this lasting quality?

> on switching keyboard layout it switches focus from current window while it writes some file to disk.

I don't use GNOME, but I've noticed switching keyboard layout in Fcitx being slow. This is especially annoying since I have four different layouts and switching back-and-forth requires cycling through all the others.

I wonder whether this is actually a problem at a deeper layer. (Possibly that layer was originally created for GNOME.) Do you happen to have a link to a bug tracker for this issue?

> The reason is simple.

Linux desktop really sucks.

While I am as idiosyncratic as anyone about Linux desktops (I run the Trinity Desktop Environment, which is basically the old KDE 3 kept up to date), and I am no fan of systemd or hw support problems (amdgpu, for instance, insists on locking up my laptop every so often), I don't think any of these things are the primary reason people run windows. I think the primary reason people run windows is that they have to use it at work and so they're familiar with it and don't even bother considering other alternatives.

> Instead of whole community stepping together and make ONE well made, bugless desktop

The reason this hasn't happened is simple: there are no market forces driving it to happen. What would create such market forces would be for large corporations, or governments, to abandon Windows for Linux. It would probably end up cheaper, since the cost of development of a well made, bugless Linux desktop would probably amortize to less than the Windows tax per unit. But it would require someone to be willing to do something different from what everyone else is doing, and that's not a way to get ahead in a large corporation or government.

>I don't think any of these things are the primary reason people run windows. I think the primary reason people run windows is that they have to use it at work and so they're familiar with it and don't even bother considering other alternatives.

I think this is slowly changing. I'm seeing more and more people who have given up Windows and moved to 1) Macbooks, 2) tables, 3) Chromebooks, or 4) just using phones.

I agree that the Linux desktop failures aren't the primary reason people run Windows, but it hasn't helped.

>It would probably end up cheaper, since the cost of development of a well made, bugless Linux desktop would probably amortize to less than the Windows tax per unit.

There's no "probably" about it. We already have fairly decent Linux desktops (just use Ubuntu: for most people, it "just works" most of the time, and it costs nothing). The Windows tax is already the largest BOM item for a PC. The additional cost needed to make Debian or Ubuntu into something even more bug-free and fully-featured wouldn't be that much. In fact, this was basically the whole idea behind many Linux distros: give them away for free to the masses, but sell support contracts to large corporations and governments to finance it. Unfortunately, that didn't work out so well. It's worked for Red Hat, but that's about the only company that's done well in this space, mainly because of US Government contracts.

I think a missing piece of the story is that there haven't been UX designers involved in the development of Linux DEs. MS and Apple have money and motivation to hire UX people and do user testing on their interfaces and they don't even get it right all the time. The folks doing open source desktop environment development are mostly scratching their own itches and so (I think) by definition, developing niche products.

EDIT: For which I am extremely grateful BTW. I love to see experimentation in the UI space. Just pointing out a reason we got here that I don't see mentioned often.

> bugless desktop

Nobody has achieved or will achieve that. Moving between macos, windows, and Linux - all have their issues.

> where most of people wouldnt need to install 3rd party hacks, edit config files

It's pretty close. Using either Fedora or Ubuntu, I didn't need to tweak anything in years to make normal desktop experience work.

My roommate at work used to give me grief for using MacBook. He used Ubuntu on some kind of Lenovo laptop. His keyboard would stop working at least once a day. I knew because he was using really loud mechanical keyboard. So I would give him grief about spending half his time "fixing" his Ubuntu. One of the best work roommates I ever had.

On a more serious note; I could not believe how little, at least from looking over my roommate's shoulder, Linux desktop experience improved since I last used it in 2005.