I... I think I agree. Their tacit collusion with GNOMEs harmful policy push that started ~2 years ago burned a lot of goodwill, and the lack of meaningful changes started to go far beyond whay you'd expect for a minimalist operating system. At this point, I think they're in the same delusional mindset as the GNOME foundation, eg.: "our users don't know what's best for them!"
It's very frustrating to watch desktop Linux head down this path, and it's started to severely limit the amount of software I can comfortably use on my desktop. Unless sonething changes, I seriously worry for the future of similar Linux projects that fight for control and refuse to collaborate meaningfully.
> At this point, I think they're in the same delusional mindset as the GNOME foundation, eg.: "our users don't know what's best for them!"
To be fair, I think they're trying to emulate Apple's behavior in this regard which ended up actually working very well for them. Not that I necessarily agree with that decision, I hate Apple for it, but I can't really blame them either when Apple has created what's considered the peak of UX these days using this mindset.
I dunno. I’ve been using apple for years and wanted a linux that is a bit similar wrt multiple desktops in particular the three-finger swipe between desktops. Elementary OS has that, and it’s also vaguely pretty. At least that was my impression of the live cd. But it took me forever to set it up properly. It’s full of bundled software which u don’t need. And it’s even more opinionated than apple, while being less polished.
What bugs me, after having spent several days to get this to work, is that I realised that they made the decision that software isn’t allowed to use systray icons. So software like the Dropbox client don’t work out of the box, because they can’t be accessed via gui. There’s oodles of people who complain about this, and the elementary os answer was something like “this (systray) api was deprecated years ago”, like it’s our own fault we rely on software that needs them.
> It's very frustrating to watch desktop Linux head down this path, and it's started to severely limit the amount of software I can comfortably use on my desktop.
I agree. At the heart of it, this is what has led to me begin to shift away from Linux and to BSD.
It's very frustrating to watch desktop Linux head down this path, and it's started to severely limit the amount of software I can comfortably use on my desktop. Unless sonething changes, I seriously worry for the future of similar Linux projects that fight for control and refuse to collaborate meaningfully.