> there is a venue and a governance organization to standardize the protocols and compositor interoperability that is needed
I'm not sure if that applies specifically to this case, but I'm not a fan of some standardization of protocols that is going on in Linux desktops, because:
- desktop managers can't properly keep state of your windows anymore on shutting off/on monitors. Claimed reason why this is not fixable: "the standard requires it"
- I dislike MM/DD/YYYY date formats. File managers used to have their own setting to choose your date format. Now they use some common standard so you have to set your Linux locale to something non-US. This then breaks other things. It's much nicer to be able to configure things per-application.
- Kolourpaint used to have a good color picker that showed you the numerical and hex values of colors. Now it has a horrible one that is only some palette where you can edit individual entries. You can't easily see the RGB values of a pixel in an image you open in Kolourpaint anymore. All due to "standardization", using a shared color picker component
- Focus stealing prevention no longer properly works, all due to adhering to some desktop standards
- Desktops like KDE and Cinnamon using horrible non-human editable json/xml/base64-encoded UTF-16 formats for their config
- Some Qt or GDK applications not having icons sometimes, due to them expecting some common icons available somewhere. This issue used to not exist, applications came with their own icons that just worked
I much preferred how unix and the desktop used to be, where you could manually edit textual config files to do whatever you want, and had the power and flexibility to change almost anything in intuitive ways
>I'm not a fan of some standardization of protocols that is going on in Linux desktops
Standardization and Linux desktops are sometimes mutual conflicting terms.
There's doesn't seem to be much standardization on this front but tribes of people saying "new things should be this way" and other tribes saying "n'ah mate, that sucks, we'll keep using our own better way".
Linux desktops don't have the Apple/Microsoft dictatorship powers to actually enforce any kind of GUI standards so we get this constant hassle and even more fragmentation.
> Linux desktops don't have the Apple/Microsoft dictatorship powers to actually enforce any kind of GUI standards so we get this constant hassle and even more fragmentation.
Do Apple and Microsoft actually have them? The GUI experience on Windows is relatively disjointed, and Apple famously did it to itself with e.g. randomly chosen brushed metal windows and other app-specific background textures. It appears far more common now for popular applications to ship their own look & feel and even theming. Let's say Discord, or even first-party, VS Code.
I'd say the accomplishments of standardization and interoperability on the Linux desktop are actually more substantial than on either Windows or MacOS. Consider that e.g. KDE and Gnome applications share a lot of important standards and are generally able to run in either vendor's shells. Windows and MacOS each effectively only have a single GUI frontend, so this kind of collaboration between vendors doesn't need to be accomplished, and it's not happening between the app makers, either.
>brushed metal windows and other app-specific background textures.
You're about a decade late with this complaint... and wrong. The brushed metal look was for application windows that resembled "appliances", which would remain open as you loaded/saved different projects. This was to distinguish them from the normal white document windows, which are tied 1-to-1 to a file.
I'm not saying they always followed this rule exactly... but there definitely was a rule. And the Apple of the era would publish detailed Human Interface Guidelines detailing all the thinking and intended practices. Third party mac software of that era was famously extremely consistent too, because of this shared base.
I only have one request from Linux desktops: mac style shortcuts with meta instead of ctrl. I also know it will never happen because everyone took their cues from messy Microsoft instead of the superior Apple practices.
You can usually set a custom date format without changing the locale, and you can usually find a tool to edit the nasty config file it's buried in. It is a pain though.
I'm not sure if that applies specifically to this case, but I'm not a fan of some standardization of protocols that is going on in Linux desktops, because:
- desktop managers can't properly keep state of your windows anymore on shutting off/on monitors. Claimed reason why this is not fixable: "the standard requires it"
- I dislike MM/DD/YYYY date formats. File managers used to have their own setting to choose your date format. Now they use some common standard so you have to set your Linux locale to something non-US. This then breaks other things. It's much nicer to be able to configure things per-application.
- Kolourpaint used to have a good color picker that showed you the numerical and hex values of colors. Now it has a horrible one that is only some palette where you can edit individual entries. You can't easily see the RGB values of a pixel in an image you open in Kolourpaint anymore. All due to "standardization", using a shared color picker component
- Focus stealing prevention no longer properly works, all due to adhering to some desktop standards
- Desktops like KDE and Cinnamon using horrible non-human editable json/xml/base64-encoded UTF-16 formats for their config
- Some Qt or GDK applications not having icons sometimes, due to them expecting some common icons available somewhere. This issue used to not exist, applications came with their own icons that just worked
I much preferred how unix and the desktop used to be, where you could manually edit textual config files to do whatever you want, and had the power and flexibility to change almost anything in intuitive ways