20 years of Linux on the Desktop (part 4)
89 comments
·July 23, 2025streptomycin
prmph
GNOME is ugly, to me. Personally I think KDE is the pinnacle of Linux desktops. Might be a bit heavy, but there is no other Linux desktop I think comes close to it in the level of polish and aesthetics, and I've used a lot of them.
I consider KDE even more polished than the MacOS and Windows desktops.
WD-42
I really don’t see the polish everyone talks about in KDE. Here’s a perfect example: Konsole the KDE terminal. https://apps.kde.org/konsole/
Why does the toolbar need giant copy/paste buttons? Is any terminal user actually clicking buttons to copy and paste? The vertical space those buttons take up is enough room for at least 2 more lines of actual terminal output, which is important.
The UI is just such a mess.
prmph
The KDE UI is actually a marvel of consistency, thoughtfulness, configurability, and beauty, IMO.
For your complaint, have you thought about the fact that those buttons are very useful when running in a virtualized environment (which many people, including me, frequently do)? It saves you from having to fiddle around with matching the key combinations for copy/paste you are used to on your host.
Plus, using KDE in general does not mean you have to use all it's apps. I personally use Tilix instead of Konsole most times. Just like most would probably prefer to use Firefox or some other browser instead of Konqueror.
graynk
I try to use KDE every 3-4 years and always come back to GNOME (which is bad in its own way)
It's still, to this day, full of growing-pains-bugs, so every time a die from a thousand papercuts. I use NVIDIA+Wayland though and a lot of issues stem from that. Still, GNOME behaves better for me
jimmaswell
What exactly bothers you in KDE? I've used it on a bunch of Gentoo installations this year with only the more minor consternations expected of a Linux desktop like changing default shortcuts.
As a side note, getting to wobbly windows has become a milestone of a Gentoo installation for me now - GPU driver has to be functioning for compositing, so by that point the system is largely functional. Feels like a rewarding treat at the end - it's a trivial graphical task on any modern hardware but it still feels like a fun flex after growing up with Pentium 4-esque workstations that couldn't handle KDE at all.
freedomben
Same. I like much of the philosophy behind KDE, but every few years or so when I try it I'll hit something (or more typically, a series of things) until I reach a point where I just go back to Gnome.
When AI gets to a point where I can just have it fork Gnome and make the changes I want to it without a large effort from me, it will be a momentous occasion :-)
e3bc54b2
KDE has been lighter than GNOME for a few years now.. Their continuous iteration and polishing approach instead of break-the-world-and-remould-it-in-our-image approach from Gnome also shows up in any real-world use.
FuriouslyAdrift
Xfce hands down...
lvl155
For me, if they put Windows 10/11 on Debian that’d be an endgame desktop. MacOS was nice for awhile but they’re trying to do too much.
pjmlp
Windows kernel has lots of nice features that people wishing for this usually don't get, including virtualization based security for key kernel modules, and drivers.
If Microsoft would care they have all the penguin tools,
https://github.com/microsoft/azurelinux
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure-sphere/product-overv...
atoav
As a long year user of Windows (Windows 95 till Windows 11), MacOS and KDE Plasma, I have to say that KDE Plasma by this point is the best of the bunch.
What sucks in Windows is that you have multiple layers of old configuration editors none of which allow you to configure everything, want to change Network settings? There are literally 10 different places to do that and some haven't changed since Windows 98.
MacOS has this things where stuff you should be able to configure isn't or at least you can't rely on it being configurable next time. Just running a binary can be a challenge of remembering which obscure key you need to hold down so your OS treats you like a big boy. Every software update removes icons from my dock and I have to pray my audio interface still works (or roll back, which is a pain in the..)
The thing Windows and MacOS got going for them is that there is a lot more softeare for them, but since the enshittification-wave you can't really trust that something that works today, will work in a year.
KDE Plasma on the other hand just gets better, everything is configurable, the network settings alone put any other OS to shame easily. All the rest just seems to work, the desktop environment never once got into my way and when it did I could change it into not doing that ever again.
edg5000
GNOME 3 is the best desktop UI I've ever used, and I've used MacOS 9 all the way to Sonoma, and Windows 3.1 all the way to 10. Critical point is that stock GNOME 3 is really terrible. Canonical has a plugin which provides an app launcher. This is the missing piece which makes GNOME 3 amazing. Using JavaScript will make developing bug-free software more difficult as the codebase scales though, it will make development slower and also slow down the code. That is absolutely a mistake. Not sure how much is JS currently; at least some it is. But I never have to look at the code because it just works. I'm on Ubuntu 22 LTS though, not sure about newer GNOME versions.
eptcyka
I will take JS over writing plugins in C any day of the week. Gnome devs felt the same way. This way, they can iterate faster on plugins and extending the compositor.
wwfn
I'm curious if having JS makes the code more approachable for potential contributors or extension authors. And then if a project does "better" (measure utility to users? sustainability/longevity?) with more bugs but more engagement. Maybe that's just another way of asking "Cathedral or Bazaar?"
runjake
> I'm curious if having JS makes the code more approachable for potential contributors or extension authors.
Yes, this was a primary reason[1].
hodgehog11
I'm on Fedora Workstation, latest version. Can confirm, current GNOME is still amazing and getting even better. But yes, this is all with the Dash-to-Dock extension.
spauldo
I jumped off the GNOME train early because of their philosophy of appealing to the average user by removing options power users want. The UI guidelines Sun donated to them were all about removing customization and "unnecessary" options to simplify the user experience, and early GNOME went all in on it.
KDE took a different approach, balancing power user needs vs. average user needs. That's where I wound up after I reached the point where maintaining a 2,000 line .fvwmrc was no longer appealing.
My conclusion was that there is no "one-size-fits-all" desktop. Fortunately a good chunk of formerly duplicated functionality has been moved outside of GNOME and KDE so I barely notice when I'm running a GNOME program on KDE these days.
kccqzy
There is a large and thriving ecosystem of GNOME extensions that add or remove various UI elements, change their appearance or behavior in all kinds of ways, including a tiling window manager. Many Linux distributions simply shipped extensions for GNOME 3 to make things look like GNOME 2. I personally never liked the traditional desktop metaphor anyways and enjoyed customizing my desktop with different extensions.
You won't get this landscape of diversity and customization if you just iterated on GNOME 2.
codewiz
In my past experience, too many extensions tend to break every time GNOME Shell is upgraded and it can take a long time to get them fixed.
The GNOME developers have signaled over and over again that they're unwilling to provide stable APIs for UI customization. Being a developer myself, I can see why it's a burden, but the current situation is that it's being done anyway through unofficial extensions and users are left to deal with the random breakage.
pjmlp
Not only we had them, they were written in native languages, not performance hogs running on top of gjs.
Signed, former contributor to Gktmm during the GNOME 1.0 days.
streptomycin
With a broad enough definition of "iterate" you could have. Regardless, 99% of users don't want to customize their desktop environment so the defaults are really important.
StopDisinfo910
With a broad definition of iterate, Gnome 3 is itself an iteration of Gnome 2.
MisterTea
The Gnome desktop churn was a bit of a headache. Gnome 3 took this weird tablet approach like Windows 8 did and it felt like they were playing "keeping up with the Jones's" instead of making a solid user experience. I remember around that time trying to record video from my Thinkpad's webcam using Cheese which was a buggy mess. That made me really mad as the Gnome team clearly focused on rearranging the furniture instead of focusing on improving the components that make up the entire desktop experience.
I used to like Mate and moved to Cinnamon but lately I just use XFCE and call it a day.
coldpie
> The Gnome desktop churn was a bit of a headache ... lately I just use XFCE and call it a day
Yeah, the desktop roller coaster is fun for a year or two, but eventually you get tired of constantly being jerked around for no reason so you switch to XFCE and everything just works and stays the same for decades. The PC desktop is a solved problem, and XFCE is the solution.
SequoiaHope
I stayed on the gnome train and it’s always interesting how it changes and sometimes makes no sense and sometimes it gets worse in ways that matter or are just annoying but mostly I like it. It works for me and I don’t have any interest in other window managers. It’s cute!
porridgeraisin
Yep. I did the same thing. Went through the usual dance of trying out gnome, hit the extension breakage(there's been many of them over the years I can't even tell you which one it was) and I moved to KDE. They changed a whole bunch of crap in one of the releases and everything moved around... Oh and latte dock broke. A bunch of other crap broke every now and then as well. Mind you this was all before they both moved to wayland.
I moved to XFCE soon after and it's great. I found a random plugin with last commit 7 years ago and it works Just Fine today. I set up my desktop 3y ago and it works the exact same way today. I know all the screens I use by heart. It's great.
Although I must say, I'm a sucker for animations and background blur and wobbly windows especially. Loved KDE for that.
I wish I could have XFCE's stability + animations. Ah well.
DrewADesign
I appreciate all open source work, but the gnome 3 UI definitely hit like an attempt to chase trends rather than improve usability. A lot of times, designers get pushed by team leadership to chase trendy paradigms and techniques because the leaders don’t want to feel like they’re out of date, but just like architectural changes in code, impetuous revamps cause problems that take time and testing to ferret out and address. Some of the design choices in Linux desktops over the years, however, just felt like ham-fisted amateur design. Who ever thought it was a good idea to have no visual feedback on a gui login screen while entering your password? Not even a password box, or anything saying “enter your password?” Something like that reeks of a cocky wannabe designer hearing a talk about reducing cognitive load by reducing unnecessary visual elements on a screen, probably figured “well the password doesn’t show up on the command line login, and if the password isn’t showing up, then why is a password box necessary” or something like that. Doing it right is harder than it looks.
edg5000
I don't get that argument. GNOME 3 with the Canonical app launcher (default on Ubuntu, it provides an alternative to the stock fullscreen app launcher with its awkwardly huge icons) really has great UI design. At least the statusbar controls, settings, file management, and basic apps like calculator. Not sure which parts you think are bad? (apart from the garbage stock app launcher, haha)
freedomben
> Gnome 3 took this weird tablet approach like Windows 8 did and it felt like they were playing "keeping up with the Jones's" instead of making a solid user experience.
It definitely did feel like they were getting ready for mobile/tablets when they designed and released Gnome 3, but I felt they did (and do) a great job at making a fantastic desktop and mobile interface. I was a vocal advocate at the time basically saying, "Yes let's consider how it will work on mobile, but we can't compromise the desktop experience in pursuit of it." I do think they went a little too far on minimalism (for example, the lack of system tray to this day still irks me, and although I don't like to install extensions, that one is a must), but they did make a beautiful desktop that functioned very well for desktop/laptop use. The keyboard-driven nature makes it a joy for me, and the toolbar and hot corner make it very usable for a mouse-driven user. Even plain Gnome 3 is plenty usable, and among non-technical family members who I've installed Linux for, they generally love it and it's simplicity. For more power users, extensions are a thing (though I would agree the dev landscape for them is awful and it's in part because of the Gnome team's decisions).
I would love to see them build in a system tray, and try to make the APIs more stable from release to release so extensions aren't on a constant treadmill of breakage.
zerocrates
Really everything to do with the "Mac-envy" top bar is a miss: the removal of any other status icons without an extension, the now-aborted attempt to make applications define a single menu and render it up there, the vast oceans of space you're not allowed to use for anything.
zozbot234
GNOME's "tablet" approach actually works great on well-supported x86 hardware (either actual tablets or touchscreen laptops that can flip the screen for tablet use). It was truly state-of-the-art until quite recently, only surpassed by the new iPadOS 26 release.
MisterTea
Thing is, I'm not a tablet user so those features dont mean anything to me. I also dont have a tablet save for a Surface Go I rarely use. My newest laptop is an old Lenovo x270 from 2012 or so.
mixmastamyk
Have a starlite tablet and can say no, not a single gnome video player works well with tablets.
We lost so much functionality in the gnome 3 transition, and they didn’t even succeed at touch.
Browser based video players work well with touch so the hardware is fine.
umanwizard
Who is “we” ?
fsflover
It would be a monopoly dictating its rules on everybody?
hulitu
> I sometimes wonder what it would be like today if we had just kept iterating on GNOME 2
You mean fixing bugs ? No way. It is boring as hell. /s
righthand
I think the general fallacy of Linux Desktop is that there needs to be some sort of tangible market share to make using it tangible. That’s never been the truth though, perhaps for Ubuntu, but most Linux distributions are made by people trying to escape the market share people.
slightwinder
The simple reason is to get access to the same software/hardware that people on Windows can use. And for this, you need to have a selling point for the companies building those toys, which is the market share, because it's a universally working argument with companies.
jm4
I think market share is important to the extent that the OS receives enough developer support to be easy to use. What I mean by easy to use is you can generally find good software and you don't find it difficult being a user of a niche OS in a world where most people use something else.
Linux on the desktop feels about the same as Mac OS X back in the early 2000's. It hasn't quite taken off yet, but it's past the point where you can be a user and generally expect things to work well. Overall, I'm very happy with where Linux on the desktop is these days.
edg5000
> but most Linux distributions are made by people trying to escape the market share people
I never thought about it like that, but it makes sense in a lot of ways! PS Linux desktop has reached 5% I believe.
coldpie
> > but most Linux distributions are made by people trying to escape the market share people
> I never thought about it like that, but it makes sense in a lot of ways!
Yeah. I developed Linux/open-source software for more than a decade, and the point was never to gain marketshare for Linux. The point was to develop good software that people would want to use. I don't care what software other people use, so long as it doesn't impact what software I can use. We would occasionally get suggestions from particularly enthusiastic users to make the experience worse(!) for Windows users, because it would promote the Linux experience. Just completely missing the point.
DrBazza
Another 'problem' with the Linux desktop was that it was entrepreneur hostile due to the culture. The kind of folks that YC might have funded a decade ago..
Pre-mobile, pre-'fast internet', there wasn't really a home in Linux land for paid-for apps, there were a few, but not many. And devs flocked to Windows, and to a lesser extent Macs.
Fortunately, in 2025, people are developing software as a service, and that can be successfully achieved using Linux as your buyers aren't other Linux users. Paid-for (native/desktop) apps are still a rarity and probably will continue to be.
spauldo
I suspect this was a minor issue. Sure, Linux users are generally more open to using free software, but in cases where there is no free alternative you still didn't see many companies targeting Linux.
Most of the software used in my field (industrial automation) is commercial. Our engineers use AutoCAD. I use Control Expert, Kepware, and Aveva System Platform. Our techs use software that's specifically designed to interface with field equipment, such as flow computers, VFDs, and valve actuators. There are no real alternatives to these; we'd use them regardless of what OS they run on. They're all Windows-only because all the other industrial software is Windows-only. It's a massive chicken-and-egg problem.
(And before someone brings up FreeCAD and the like - no, those aren't real alternatives for an existing engineering company. We have lots of stuff we've developed for the tools we have. We're locked in.)
Hilift
Hard to get to tangible with an ecosystem that is fragmented. There are products that support two or three distros but if you have something else it could be a deal breaker. We had some oddball distro for special devices that was imperfect in almost every way. That alone was infuriating, but the real fun came when evaluating third party products. We also had people that refused to upgrade from RHEL6.
lenerdenator
I saw a meme the other day about what Jigsaw would set up as a torture for a Linux developer in the Saw movies.
It would be to have them sitting in a room, in front of a Linux laptop with a perfectly usable userland utility and expecting them to not reinvent the wheel. The door would be unlocked and the developer would be free to leave at any time.
jrm4
I'd always argued that GNOME/Unity was garbage, but funny that I'd never bothered to read up on the history and background of exactly why, so this is illuminating.
For me it generally lines up with what it felt like was going on with those projects, aka "5 mediocres in a trenchcoat will never add up to a Steve Jobs, but lets go ahead and try and beat Apple at their own game."
Count me in with those who think Ubuntu missed the boat badly by not stepping in strongly when Windows XP reached end of life, like "We're your boring desktop now!"
thewebguyd
> I'd always argued that GNOME/Unity was garbage
Mostly agree, except one Unity feature that never came back in any other DE. What Canonical called the "HUD" - being able to search through application menus, like you can on macOS from the help menu (and now from spotlight on macOS 26).
Instead everyone (Except KDE) decided to go backwards in terms of desktop UI design, and started shoving everything into stupid hamburger menus trying to look like Android because "Convergence" was the big buzz word of the time, and everyone (including Microsoft) thought we'd all just start using one device - a phone/tablet/PC hybrid device.
Unfortunately, KDE was also going through its transition to KDE 4 at this time which eventually did get much better but it was rough going for a while.
This was the time period that I moved to OS X, and have been on mac ever since. Ironically Apple is now going down the same road of missteps that the Linux DEs did back then, and would have pushed me back to linux by now if I could just get a laptop on par with the apple silicon macbooks.
haunter
> Count me in with those who think Ubuntu missed the boat badly by not stepping in strongly when Windows XP reached end of life, like "We're your boring desktop now!"
huh I never thought about this but makes perfect sense. Sad times
linguae
I remember the late 2000s and the early 2010s. This was not a good time for the Linux desktop. I was a Mac OS X user at the time, but I used Linux in virtual machines for development, and so I paid attention to the Linux desktop landscape.
Let's step back half a decade to the mid-2000s. Things were looking great for the Linux desktop. GNOME 2 and KDE 3 were well-received, though I do remember some grumblings about GNOME 2 "dumbing down" certain UI elements. Also, Windows was fumbling back then. Windows XP at the time was suffering from security issues, and Windows Vista was poorly received. There was always the allure of Mac OS X for those who wanted a Unix desktop but with a proprietary desktop environment (Aqua) and support for proprietary software packages such as Microsoft Office and the Adobe Creative Suite. Of course, switching to Mac OS X meant purchasing a Mac, which was a high barrier for many people. Given people's frustration with Windows at the time and the cost of buying a Mac, it seemed like the "the year of the Linux" desktop was just a few years away.
But then came GNOME 3, which was so controversial that it led to the development of MATE and Cinnamon. KDE 4 was also not well-received, leading to a fork of KDE 3 named Trinity. In the meanwhile, Microsoft released Windows 7, which was well-received and is considered one of the best versions of Windows of all time, alongside Windows 2000. Also, Apple released Mac OS X Snow Leopard, which many Mac users consider the pinnacle of Mac OS X.
I think the controversies surrounding GNOME 3 and KDE 4, combined with Microsoft's getting its act together for Windows 7 and the allure of Jobs-era Mac OS X releases, helped push back "the year of the Linux desktop."
Personally I wish Etoile (http://etoileos.com/), an experimental desktop built using the GNUstep (https://www.gnustep.org/) framework in the late 2000s and early 2010s, had taken off....it would have been really cool to have some type of alternate universe FOSS Mac OS X-like system.
danans
Most people don't want to "install a distro" on their desktop computer.
They buy desktop computers like they buy microwave ovens: hardware + OS without any sense of distinction between the two. Then they decide what to cook in it (based on their own culinary interests).
There have been only a few opportunities in the history of desktop computing for a new user-facing OS to break through, usually at the emergence of a new user paradigm (i.e mobile), and those have all been captured by big brands like Apple, MS, and Google, using either complete vertical or tightly horizontal integration, and their offerings were mostly like microwave ovens.
Ironically, all 3 of those companies now offer "Linux" that you can run on top of their desktop OS's to use for software development, effectively making Linux an "app", no different than Photoshop. And that paradigm works pretty well.
thewebguyd
> Ironically, all 3 of those companies now offer "Linux" as an environment you can run on top of their desktop OS's for software development, effectively making Linux an "app", no different from Photoshop. And that paradigm works pretty well.
It does work really well, almost too well. The conspiracy theorist in me wants to say that even though it's providing a useful feature, particularly for devs, it's all an anti-competitive practice to keep people from experiencing true computing freedom, going "See - you can have all your same Linux tools right from [macOS/Windows/ChromeOS/Android] - please stay on our proprietary and telemetry infested OS, don't free yourself.
OTOH, WSL was a godsend when I had to use Windows, and actually made Windows relatively pleasant to use outside of the recent copilot everywhere shenanigans. There's something nice about having an integrated Linux environment (or "app") within a polished desktop environment with access to all the big commercial software. It doesn't feel good to use, from an ideological standpoint, but damn if it isn't productive.
danans
> it's all an anti-competitive practice to keep people from experiencing true computing freedom
That's pretty much the history of all non-free software products, nothing specific to OS's. It turns out there isn't much of a market for computing freedom, but there is one for packaging up its innovations.
somat
What I like about the linux desktop is that it does not have to be this super heavy "and the kitchen sink" environment. There is a lot of freedom to be found here. Some would say almost too much.
For example, I am a sys-admin, not only do I not mind managing my system via text console, I prefer it. It is fairly trivial to go off the deep end of "standard desktop environments" install one of them tiling window managers and have my perfect desktop, nothing overlaps, terminals for days, hot-keys to do anything, I never see my root window. No file-manager, it is almost the anti-desktop. I love it. But this amazing environment just does not exist in microsoft or apple land.
ChocolateGod
> A JavaScript desktop? Seriously? Yeah, it was cool for screenshots but it was slow and barely usable.
GNOME is at least usable now due to a mix of performance improvements over the years and faster hardware, but it still eats RAM (my current session is running at 3.4GB RSS with just the AppIndicators extension).
But, I wonder had GNOME not gone this direction whether the Linux desktop wouldn't be so fragmented as it is now.
rebeccaskinner
I remember back in the gnome2 days there was still a lot of fragmentation. Gnome, KDE, WindowMaker, AfterStep, Enlightenment, ratpoison.
Linux has always appealed to tinkerers and that was always going to lead to some amount of fragmentation. I don’t think it’s a bad thing necessarily. For all of the complaints about it, systemd has unified a lot of things that used to be handled through desktop environments and made things less fragmented as a whole.
ChocolateGod
No the fragmentation is worse now, GNOME wasn't even going to support the same DRM-leasing protocol (needed for VR) that all the other Wayland compositors agreed on until Valve told them it was adamant it wasn't going to support their custom protocol.
77pt77
> ratpoison
That's a really fringe window manager.
Not a desktop environment like the others.
spauldo
Afterstep and Windowmaker were also just window managers (you can kinda argue Windowmaker with the whole GNUSTEP thing, but that never really took off).
I believe ratpoison is the granddaddy of today's tiling desktops, which have a decent following.
p_l
GNOME started moving in that direction back in 2.4 release - GNOME 3 was where, for better or worse (my personal opinion for worse) they decided to experiment even further away from the beaten path.
But the seeds of what became GNOME 3 were sown in first 3 releases of GNOME 2, not in widely discussed but unrelated to actual decisions talks about patents.
bee_rider
The fragmented Linux desktop is not really a problem IMO.
People want to customize their desktops. One way that could happen is through having some sort of grand super-flexible window manager than can do anything, and then customize their behavior in some configuration language. Another way is for interested folks to write their window managers in C or whatever language they want. The latter is usually more performant, and has less social coordination overhead, so it was the way things worked out.
I mean, we have Windows and Apple, with all the programmer-hours spent on their window managers, and they aren’t anywhere near as flexible as the open source ecosystem.
geoffbp
2025 - year of the Linux desktop
calvinmorrison
KDE 3.5 Gang
haunter
I use TDE more and more and unironically became my favorite DE nowadays
calvinmorrison
Yes I'm a sometimes contributor of tde
doublerabbit
I've recently found comfort in IceWM.
fsflover
Recent discussions:
Part 1, 5 points, 4 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44593958
Part 2, 36 points, 9 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42435282
Part 3, 35 points, 12 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43320364
jmclnx
Somehow I missed parts 1 -- 3, but those are linked in the part 4 article.
Started with part 1, so far it seems interesting.
I sometimes wonder what it would be like today if we had just kept iterating on GNOME 2 rather than trying to do 50 different new things simultaneously...
Personally I still use MATE :)