pele writes "After 5 years of sabbatical from unix desktops and having decided that it was time to check back in. What struck me the most is that, beneath all those themes and eye candy (wobbly windows etc) Linux desktop didn't get that far after 15 years of development. Sure it detected that I had NVIDIA graphics card on my laptop and downloaded the latest and greatest proprietary (yuck, shudder) drivers for it. OpenOffice is fast and pretty. Mozilla and Chrome play ball (up to a point). But then GRUB loads in one resolution and font, Linux boots a completely different resolution and font. Then Ubuntu takes over and gets rid of all that, replacing it with a simple logo, then the desktop appears. It should've taken over even before GRUB as far as I'm concerned. But then those fonts still don't feel right.
Then mouse clicks don't feel right. Now how is that possible? I have noticed 16 years ago that there was something wrong with mouse clicks on linux desktops (back then it was slackware that named your machine "gonzo" with openwindows-like WM and widgets, forgot their names now), they somehow felt "heavy", you needed to click the mouse twice as hard as on other operating systems for it to do something. Right-clicks were even worse. Back then Windows 3.x was similarly crude but slightly better. NEXTSTEP was half way there. SunOS/Solaris and Irix boxen were nice.
Icons still don't feel right. Their aspect is somehow off and they aren't as sharp as they were even 16 years ago on OpenWindows and Windows 3.x. I remember OS/2 Warp 4 or whatever that thing was called was similar, looked horrible, not elegant, not pretty.
I don't know but somehow it seems to me that 16 years of development effort has been wasted on themes, multiple email clients of which not one does it's job properly, GNOME and KDE kerfufle, neither of which is consistent across the board (you inevitably find one or two dialog windows that haven't changed their theme, have a check-box that wandered off to a side, window decoration that didn't refresh properly etc) and millions upon trillions of gadgets that all seem to do the same thing — show a pretty graph or icon and have a configuration/preferences panel that's either too simple and offers no configuration options or simply scares you with its multitude of check boxes and useless configuration options.
Video finally plays but then it looses synch sometimes, sometimes refresh rate is horrible.
I also had a look at Haiku and while I didn't want or need an OS to play with (I need something to live with) at least the boys made it consistent across the board. Mouse feel is ok. Fonts are right. Icons are ok, ugly but ok. Snazzy, fast, clean, everything checks. No apps though so no go, not for me anyway.
So, what exactly needs to be done to kill of either GNOME or KDE, GTK or QT, Upstart (or was it startup?) or GRUB, n-1 email client, n-1 shutdown button, n-1 network and load monitor, concentrate on "doing one thing and doing it right" tm and get it over and done with?!"