What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)
I think it was the inability for GUI&#x27;s to stay stable. Gnome went off the rails, Unity completely ruined Ubuntu[1], and KDE always felt very cheap and hard to navigate. My opinion, yes, but I always felt the GUI changes in Linux were extremely gratuitous after Gnome 2.<p>Couple this with the fact that for a decade, the actual GUI was tied very, very heavily to the apps. So you had to use Gedit in Gnome, or whatever the KDE version of a fucking text editor is. Seemed really, really stupid. Can&#x27;t we just have a relatively standard GUI text editor across platforms? Or were we all just expected to use vi and emacs?<p>When the windowing layers stopped moving around so much, and Greg Kroah-Hartman and co. had gotten the driver problems under control, we suddenly had a bunch of different Linuxes that were no longer compatible with each other due to packaging systems. So, now users had to download a deb, or a yum package, or a gentoo package... It was all very confusing for desktop users, especially beginners.<p>My quote to sum this up would be: &quot;Why are these packages in my repository if they won&#x27;t work after I install them because I&#x27;m using KDE&#x2F;Gnome&#x2F;Cinnamon?&quot;<p>[1]: Unity took Ubuntu from being the default Linux I could put on anything, to a bloated, slow moving sack of crap. I could put Ubuntu on a 2001 laptop and be completely fine, fast enough, usable enough to do just about everything I needed.<p>Put Unity Ubuntu on that same machine, and it&#x27;s unusable garbage. I can&#x27;t even hit alt-F5 to get to another terminal because Unity slows the whole rig down to an absolute crawl. Like, can&#x27;t even move the mouse, 5 minutes between keypress and action taking place. Fuck Unity. I blame Unity about 40% for killing the Linux desktop.