Agreed. I recently gave every Linux DE an honest test drive and... it's clear that nobody really has the resources to perfect them. They all get annoying after a while. I'd be happy with something as polished as Windows 95, but even XFCE has the exact same bugs as when I used it 15 years ago.

> I recently gave every Linux DE an honest test drive and... it's clear that nobody really has the resources to perfect them.

That's not strictly true. The resources were (and are) there, but they have been pointlessly squandered.

KDE3 and GNOME2 were great desktop environments. I would argue that KDE3 was the pinnacle of all desktop environments to date. Polished and usable, it was absolutely fantastic to use. Great UI, great design, and having KParts embedded in Konqueror made it really flexible and extensible. I used it for many years, and took advantage of its functionality unlike any other DE. I also used GNOME since the 0.9x days, and it also became very polished, if not less sophisticated overall. GNOME2 was definitely its peak.

What happened though was CADT. All the effort expended to build up these DEs was carelessly torn down to be rebuilt in an inferior form. Today, both of the major DEs seem to be busy aping mobile UIs instead of creating desktop UIs. GNOME/GTK have scrollbars with zero buttons and sized about 4px wide; totally unusable on a 4K display. They even broke the old paging and panning behaviours, which were excellent. They have almost completely lost their focus on the desktop, and with it, the developer base which formed the long tail of contributors.

Part of the problem is that the upcoming generation of developers have predominantly known mobile UIs; they haven't fully experienced or understood the sheer breadth and depth of rich desktop UIs. The other is that with the switch to mobile devices, there simply isn't the money in desktop UIs nowadays. While this isn't strictly a bad thing, in practice it's the loss of diverse commercial inputs which has driven GNOME off the rails and made it an insular echo chamber of bad ideas.

Not to be that guy, but what bugs have you experienced in XFCE? I've been using XFCE since Fedora 14. With the recent upgrade to Fedora 30 (from 28), I noticed they addressed my only beef with the environment by adding a greatly-improved GUI for managing multiple displays. It can save profiles for work vs home displays and (almost always) toggles between them correctly.

That was the only Linux pain point for me, having to manually toggle out of multi-screen mode after unplugging an HDMI cable. Obviously, that was some kind of kernel thing and not an XFCE-specific bug (I think?), but even the native XFCE tooling has improved in the last few years, despite the lack of a newsworthy major version release.

Fedora has been my daily driver for 8 years now. It keeps getting better. The last flaky distribution, for me, was Fedora 19, released in the summer of 2013! (Here, flaky is described as "difficult to get working the way I wanted" and "occasionally would do something weird and force me to reboot it to fix the problem")

I don't even think it's bugs that Linux desktops have a problem with. The Linux desktop is really only good if you are a hacker and don't give any thought to tasteful design or coherent usability.

> The Linux desktop is really only good if you are a hacker and don't give any thought to tasteful design or coherent usability.

That's funny because it's exactly the way I feel about macOS where they obviously design things based on the way things look and sell over how usable they are. This is actually part of Apple's DNA as we've read in the past: The only reason they stuck with the Dock was because of how well it marketed. You can read about it from the guy who developed Apple's first HIG - https://www.asktog.com/columns/044top10docksucks.html

Meanwhile my preferred Linux DE (XFCE) gives me perfectly tasteful design and coherent usability. Instead of having things look or work the way Apple wants, I am able to do things the way I want to, which means that things fit into my opinion of what is tasteful or usable. It's a ton of little things you know? Like being able to quit an app with a single gesture (a middle click on its pane icon, similar to how you close a tab in your browser) - built into XFCE and not even available in macOS unless you're Apple and you have some access to their private API.

That's because most Linux desktop environments take after Windows, which has by far a better system of usability than macOS. To point out just one small thing: In macOS the keyboard shortcuts are an insane jumble of incoherence with no pattern which is why you simply cannot navigate the entirety of macOS with just the keyboard, something that I can do all day long on Windows and Linux.

If you think you can, I'll challenge you: Open the About this mac dialog, then switch to another program. Now try to switch back to that window with just your keyboard, without using one of your special usability-fixing programs that you have to install to fix such things on your Mac, like Witch.

I've been using XFCE for about 8 years and one problem I had since beginning is how sessions (don't) work (restoring open windows after reboot). I have experienced it not saving session at all, not saving Thunar at all and saving Thunar only if it was started from Applications Menu, seemingly completely independently on settings. I have never managed to debug what was causing it. Currently it works correctly on my work computer and is buggy on my home PC, even though they are both same distro and version and I'm not aware of changing any setting that could affect that.

That said, I consider XFCE great and all bugs I encountered while using it were minor.

I was trying out xfce recently. When you orient the taskbar vertically and the clock stays vertical instead of changing to horizontal. This sort of stuff pisses me off so much. But I'm OCD like that.

It is quite impressive how far things have come.

Many years ago people would complain about even getting things installed, have stories about driver problems, missing software, incompatibilities. If today's strongest criticism is "the clock widget sometimes does not rotate automatically", I think that is a great endorsement.

That's true, but it's like a lot of little things add up. Windows 10 for example lost some of my files I was copying over from a linux drive, because ntfs is not case sensitive (by default?) and it didn't see there were two directories. So now the fear of losing more files is keeping me away from Windows.

Losing files is definitely not a little thing.

Linux rewards customization, if you don't have the time for that Gnome is a good starting point assuming you can adjust yourself to its workflow. XFCE is amazing (and was my primary before I switched to wayland/swaywm) and I have deep respect for its developers for what they have managed to produce with thunar being one of the most if not the most customizable lightweight file managers. It can have its issues at times but nothing that I have not been able to work around.

I feel like the local maximum of Gnome was in the 2.x days. Gnome has really become a truly awful environment. All of the UI is needlessly dumbed down, and the window chrome is ridiculously wasteful of space.

Isn't MATE the Gnome 2.X fork pulled forward?

I'm curious what languages you develop in? I primarily work in Java. On a Windows machine I generally install some way of using BASH (git-Bash suffices), but otherwise I can hardly tell the difference between MacOS, Windows, and Linux. I would imagine the experience is similar for languages like python, web development, etc.

Java is quite crossplatform. Python, by default, wraps system libraries, so the dev experience on Windows is very different, and special care must be taken.

But, it's the overall experience that sucks in Windows (and most linuxes imho).

I genuinely don't understand what you're referring to when you say overall experience. When I am coding I have one monitor full of IDE, one full of browser, and a console that is brought to and from focus from time to time. The experience on the 3 major platforms is extremely similar. What are you doing differently?

Didn’t WSL 2 come out recently? Has that not made things better for Windows?

Regardless your last point is why I stick with macOS. I don’t really care that much about the laptop aesthetic.

I've tried to switch from Ubuntu+Unity to OSX, and OSX feels so clunky in comparison. A year later, the mac still feels unpolished. Tiny but significant things:

- Unity puts multiple dots next to an app on the dock when you have multiple windows open. On the mac you have one dot even if you have 10 windows.

- Clicking a dock icon on unity when you have multiple windows and the app is already on top, does an expose' style selection; On a mac, you need to use expose (among all apps), right click the dock icon, or find the "Window" menu on top -- and that's assuming you know that there are multiple windows ... see first point.

- I have unity set up to make the active window 5% brighter than any other window (or dim the others to 95%, don't remember). Hardly visible, except you instantly and intuitively know which window is active, even if it's on another screen.

This is a kind of polish that OSX is missing, and that once tasted, it is painful to go without. On the other hand, when I occasionally have a chance to use Unity, there is nothing from OSX that I miss.