Much of the Linux desktop is balkanized and fragmentation is indeed a huge issue. People's obsession with choice is irritating given that doing more or less the same thing in 10 different ways half-right is worse than doing it once correctly. The entire distro-zoo built on top of the same distributions with different DE's on top of it is an example. The problem with Windows or Mac isn't that it looks, feels and works the same everywhere. That's what most people want, they don't want to spend hours tinkering with their UIs, they want to get work done.
It's not even right to compare Linux to Windows, or maybe even call Linux distros operating systems in a strong sense because they don't provide genuinely stable interfaces. People often remark on alleged benefits of open source software such as compatibility, yet it's Windows where I can click on a 20 year old executable and it runs, while I don't know if anything that has been built 2 Ubuntu LTS releases ago still works.
It's funny that one of the things that has actually driven Linux adoption is Proton. As one blogger a few months ago remarked, Win32 is basically the stable Linux userland ABI.
It's not even right to compare Linux to Windows, or maybe even call Linux distros operating systems in a strong sense because they don't provide genuinely stable interfaces. People often remark on alleged benefits of open source software such as compatibility, yet it's Windows where I can click on a 20 year old executable and it runs, while I don't know if anything that has been built 2 Ubuntu LTS releases ago still works.
It's funny that one of the things that has actually driven Linux adoption is Proton. As one blogger a few months ago remarked, Win32 is basically the stable Linux userland ABI.
https://sporks.space/2022/02/27/win32-is-the-stable-linux-us...