Well, for most of us it is.

I don’t know if it’s the case of me being old-ish, but you’ve hit the nail on the head. I’ve been using i3 with pretty much the same dot files for well over a decade, simply because it stays the hell away from the work I am doing.

My favourite WM still is fluxbox though it died, so I am using IceWM. I'd wish configuring it would be easier and more logical; it was never a problem to configure fluxbox, but configuring IceWM is a headstopper. Removing all workspaces I have not managed to achieve, for instance; it simply does not work here.

This behavior still exists with the “Stickies” application, itself an import from the pre OS X days!

Anyways... IceWM used to be my window manager of choice but since many years now I'm a happy camper with The Awesome WM (a tiling WM, but it can of course also be used in floating mode: one of my virtual desktop is always in "floating" mode).

Bring back my stupid Compiz effects. They were fun, and sometimes genuinely useful.

Why not have the actual Windows XP Explorer as your DE?

Thanks to our man in Japan, you can!

https://github.com/mikuta0407/win4wine

Any example?

Every single thing under the Sun going into systemd is going to cause issues (and probably already has with age verification laws and such) with compliance where a company is a singular target (Red Hat under IBM) to compel to make undesired changes contrary to our interests as users.

Red Hat is probably an even bigger problem than GNOME.

On the topic of WMs, some of these classics are really great. Openbox is a favorite of mine among the floating, but bspwm has been my overall favorite for 11 years.

And I don't mean the code, I mean the design / architecture / UX expertise.

As for X11, its network transparency is something I used a lot in the past and relied on. I miss it.

Can you explain why Gnome specifically? Genuine question. I know Gnome is very opinionated, many people don't like it, and these days there are super polished projects like Niri. But in what way is Gnome holding us back?

There's a very good alternative in development - check out V OS - https://v-os.dev/ - it is attempting to port the Be / Haiku GUI and SDK on to Linux, and even though it's still an alpha-beta release, the experience is really good. Unlike GTK's "clunkiness", Be/Haiku GUI feels so buttery smooth, and consumes so little computing resource (compared to GTK or Qt). As they aren't re-inventing anything new, I have high hopes for it. It just needs more support from all of us to thrive.

Switched for Unity for a few years when I was erring on Ubuntu side, where I like the minimalism style.

Gnome 3 was a shock but nothing any normal human being can easily overcome. The hardest was to live without a taskbar, but I'm free now.

Would never touch KDE-let-s-make-this-pixel-also-clickable, but that's the power of freedom: you can choose what you like.

See: https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver

Also I don't understand why you write that pipewire broke with the past. That's also totally incorrect.

Wayland I agree with your statement but that's a corporate-controlled project by the GNOMEy overlords, so this is not a surprise (GTK5 will support wayland only; that was one reason why I stopped writing more GTK code).

As for your systemd comment: again I have no idea what you write. It does not make any sense. And the word "cohesive" is odd: all the systemd components, of course, form a cohesive unit WITHIN ITSELF from the get go - that was the whole point for the systemd developers to make themselves more important. systemd was never a "replace init only" attempt, they deliberately took over the ecosystem here to leverage more control. And that also, kind of, makes sense for those controlling many computers in a, say, university campus or so; administrators find that some jobs were made easier by that. For me, and many others, systemd brought nothing to the table that was needed. They always built strawmen such as "you may abandon your legacy shell scripts booting your system" - I don't use shell scripts in general. All logic I have is done via ruby + yaml files mostly (or, data files that describe the logic in a DSL like manner), so I never had any use case for systemd. As for your claim that you do not have to tinker with systemd: again, I have no idea why you write this. It sounds like a very poor and one-sided attempt to promote systemd. You never had an issue? I had numerous issues whenever I would use systemd, starting from smaller to larger issues. For instance, I remember that my local clock was not well-aligned so I changed it. Then I tested again and noticed the clock did not change. It took me a while to figure out that systemd inserted itself here and ignored my attempt to fix the local clock. Past that point I treated systemd as an invasive virus that attempts to ignore my commands, so off it went. That's just one example of many more issues with systemd. The philosophy the systemd devs use is mega-aggressive and incompatible with many other things, including the old UNIX pipe idea as well as "everything is a file".

> We just need someone to break away clean from the cancer that is Gnome/GTK and friends.

I would not use the term cancer, but I would agree that we could need more flexibility. We simply lack viable options here. Corporations de-facto control most of the code here. Or AI. Not a good future really.

> Qt and KDE is does not count, they too are very encumbered with legacy. Yes, it will be a grind to get anything working without those, but I could live with a gtk/kde shim a la xwayland.

Again, no clue what you write here, but let's also be realistic: which alternatives to GTK or QT do you see coming up here? Plus, we then have more code for a toolkit. What we need is a meta-toolkit, that can be used in its own right (e. g. without qt and KDE) but also be used in way to allow people to create applications in qt and kde at the same time. One toolkit to rule them all. And it must be as flexible as possible. In many ways it is kind of HTML/CSS/JavaScript, de-facto really; would be nice to have a way to have something that could target all of the above, but I think the boat has sailed. HTML/CSS/JavaScript kind of won, and perhaps via webassembly we could at the least use something else other than JavaScript.