> It still looks to me like Linux 20 years ago.

I know this seems like a down side to you but the person you are replying to notes this as something they love about the platform. It not changing over time "just to change" is the point.

> It still looks to me like Linux 20 years ago. And I started with Linux in the mid 90s. Not much has changed or improved on the pure fundamentals.

Point taken, but that is exactly the quality I said I liked about it. I hope that 20 years from now my desktop will be exactly the same. The disjoint UI bothers me to an extent. I mostly use KDE apps or things built with Qt, but you're right that nothing is uniform. That said, I'd take disunity if it means stability. I don't care if the buttons in different apps look different, but don't take them away. Just look at what they did to Mail.app--in 2010 it was beautiful. Last I used it in 2020 it seemed like all the power user features of it were gone or hidden and everything was under a dot dot dot menu instead of out on the toolbar.

Sometimes it does change and when that happens is for the worse.

Some developers suddenly realize that X system is old, and then they try to redo it from zero.

And when they do that, they throw decades of feature development down the drain:

- Xorg: Was Wayland worth the 10+ years of manpower needed to catch up?

- Synaptics: Now we have libinput, less configurable and with way fewer features

- Gnome: Something that happens when the devs think "If Apple can, then we can too" but without the money to invest in good UX (Gnome2 had actual UX research done by Sun)

- Systemd: I'll concede that nobody liked SystemV. But we also had OpenRC and strangely got ignored.

Sometimes "developercracy" is terrible, and we spend years arguing if Rust or Not, instead of trying to make good software

Depends on the role. I build AI Agents for a living and Linux is for this edge case better.

> It still looks to me like Linux 20 years ago.

Like visually? I personally don't care much for animations, transitions, rounded corners (this one I actually hate, because you can't even disable them on mac). I'm not a florist, I am programmer. I want efficiency not the looks, bells and whistles. Although I recently started using Hyprland, and oh my, those window animations and transitions are super nice, not to mention that you can completely control every aspect of them.

> Oh and don't get me started on MLX...

Your pittance Apple gives you because they refuse to sign CUDA drivers? That MLX?

> It is my conviction that very few should go down the Arch route. If you want to sysadmin Linux or learn how to do so, fine.

I don't think sysadmin is fair, but certainly it's true that a lot of 'how do I do the equivalent of Windows/macOS built-in foobar' questions will have the answer 'well this is a non-exhaustive list of possible things you could install to do that'.

Which is to say that first time around it's almost inevitably going to be a lot of setup. But then it won't change, or when it does it will just be whichever puzzle piece changed - not 'Arch reimagined everything with Liquid Glass'.

>These are based on atomic Fedora and my experience is that they offer extreme stability

These were my hopes. Up until a new update introduced something that broke my nvidia drivers "integration".

After a few days I decided to try to update the system once more (which killed the oldest snapshot) and I was left with the system that can only be run in 1024 mode. I've tried every suggestion from the web to no avail.

For better or worse, I'm exactly the person who should go down this route.

Or when they switched from applications requesting exclusive access to ALSA audio devices to using sound servers for mixing, or when Xorg autoconfiguration was introduced (obviating manual Xorg.conf creation), or when the modesetting DDX replaced vendor specific DDX packages, or when Wayland was introduced with full backward compatibility with Xorg via XWayland. I suppose that last one is more of a lack of change.

Those things are changes that are announced years before they happens and you would some distributions where they’re still using the old stuff. It’s not that unavoidable changes we you only have three years of holding on to the old stuff before being abandoned.

Some of us use Slackware, with fvwm.

Yeah, I didn't mean to write a "Linux is better" polemic, just that building my own Linux desktop works better for me. I also haven't used Gnome since ~2009 except briefly to discover that Gnome 3 was trash. Unity was a travesty and I also hated it when Ubuntu force fed me that.

You're right. Locking yourself into a distro, especially the more user-friendly ones, can get you into just as much of a dictatorship as macOS.

I use i3 on X11 like a neanderthal and mostly Qt/KDE apps. I'll switch to Sway and Wayland when things stop working.

I work on computer vision stuff. Most of my time is in the browser, or on the terminal (Alacritty, tmux, neovim). I've actually become more of a GUI user since switching from macOS to Linux. I used to be way more die-hard about CLI-everything, but I love using `git gui` now. I think Dolphin is the superior file manager experience available to mankind. Okular is an excellent PDF reader, but leaves a tiny bit to be missed about Preview.

I'm fairly serious about photography and spend a lot of time editing and post-processing photos. This is a major shortcoming of my desktop and I may end up getting a MacBook just for this purpose. digiKam is just okay for organizing photos, and RawTherapee is barely okay. I don't mind it's ugly UI, but I'm discovering that even aside from UI considerations it just can't produce the results that Adobe can. Things like noise reduction are just not there.

I exclusively used macOS for about 8 years and now I'm on Bluefin, work generic web development stacks... The last bit of software I'm missing on Linux is the Serif apps... gaming (in my particular case) is sorted, I was shocked to install Steam on Blufin and have almost my entire library available.

Some workflows not possible on Windows. I avoid using Windows thus I don't care about the pain of having to depend on it - have zero interest in what's not possible somewhere else. What's your point?

The only thing from macOS I truly miss when in Linux is JXA/Applescript automation engine. That's the only thing I miss.