the default desktop [LWN.net]

the default desktop

Posted Feb 16, 2022 10:08 UTC (Wed) by aragilar (subscriber, #122569)
In reply to: the default desktop by ovitters
Parent article: McGovern: Handing over

I wonder how much of that is due to GNOME (and more importantly GTK) being the default in previous releases? For example, Ubuntu has always GNOME as a basis (as far as I know), customised to a greater or lesser extent depending on what's happening in the GNOME ecosystem, but the initial choice of GNOME (and hence the creation of the various DE alternative spins such as Kubuntu, which likely locked in GNOME being the default) happened nearly 20 years ago. Without GNOME being the default then, would it still be the default now (having gone through at least one major change since then)?

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the default desktop

Posted Feb 16, 2022 10:56 UTC (Wed) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link] (1 responses)

Could be a factor. I mostly commented because the initial comment seemed to see the negative in something, instead of assuming usually people mean well. Meaning, instead of saying that others were "elbowed out", figure out a way too see the well intentioned actions behind it.

The "assume people mean well" is something that was once in the simple GNOME CoC. I like referring to it because every time I thought I was crazy to still try the "maybe this person means well" approach it turned out that the person meant well, plus that I was too judgmental, yet again.

the default desktop

Posted Feb 16, 2022 12:35 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Which is why I try to be objective and not allocate blame. These things happen.

But, for example, SuSE was always a bastion for KDE - that was the default. Then they went agnostic and didn't give you a default. And now, I don't know, do they default to Gnome?

The problem is that if the smaller DEs lose mindshare, they then lose devs, and they fade away. Losing all that was good, which maybe cannot be replaced ...

Cheers,
Wol

the default desktop

Posted Feb 16, 2022 12:23 UTC (Wed) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link] (1 responses)

What about Unity ? It was more than a GNOME customization.

the default desktop

Posted Feb 17, 2022 9:39 UTC (Thu) by aragilar (subscriber, #122569) [Link]

I didn't use Unity, but it wouldn't surprise me that substantial portions of GNOME were still used (GNOME is more than mutter). I believe there are less than 6 working implementations of the all daemons needed for a semi-standard DE, and I suspect that in more cases than we'd like, only 2 (GNOME, KDE, XFCE, LXDE/LXQT and Enlightenment are the only DEs I know of which could support separate implementations, and I wouldn't surprise me that XFCE, LXDE/LXQT and Enlightenment either use GNOME or KDE daemons, or don't implement them).

That latter part (needing to use a single i.e. GNOME implementation), and GNOME's backwards-compatibility breaks, probably create a fair number of unhappy users/developers for GNOME. I still run bits of GNOME (such as nm-applet), even though I'm using a tiling WM (awesomewm).