Farewell, Elementary
Here are two things I feel I don&#x27;t understand about a number of quite similar &quot;desktop distributions&quot;.<p>One, what&#x27;s the target user? Is it really every type of desktop computing? In that case you&#x27;re competing with not only KDE but also GNOME, even if we confine ourselves to Linux based desktops. Two major desktops are already a bit much for such a narrow market. I totally get doing something for friends or for the joy of it, but any semi-commercial endeavour pretty much needs to outcompete them both.<p>It&#x27;s not like GNOME&#x27;s problem is too slow development which some healthy competition can fix. Seriously, I don&#x27;t think I am a completely atypical user when I value most importantly my desktop to stick around for the next decade, and work with whatever new hardware changes that comes around without annoying me too much along the way.<p>Two, are you developing a desktop environment or a Linux distribution? In the latter case, you&#x27;re competing with massive projects like Debian and Fedora. The testing required to release a general Linux distribution on just one architecture is enormous. Security response must bascially never sleep if users should be kept from risk. If the answer is &quot;both&quot; I don&#x27;t know what to say really.<p>I&#x27;m not saying there should never be any more Linux distributions, or that the computing desktop is perfect as it is. Far from it. I&#x27;m just saying that competing with the established projects here is realistically going to take a decade or more, and maybe finding a niche other than a general desktop for everyone might be a good start.