> A JavaScript desktop? Seriously? Yeah, it was cool for screenshots but it was slow and barely usable.
GNOME is at least usable now due to a mix of performance improvements over the years and faster hardware, but it still eats RAM (my current session is running at 3.4GB RSS with just the AppIndicators extension).
But, I wonder had GNOME not gone this direction whether the Linux desktop wouldn't be so fragmented as it is now.
I remember back in the gnome2 days there was still a lot of fragmentation. Gnome, KDE, WindowMaker, AfterStep, Enlightenment, ratpoison.
Linux has always appealed to tinkerers and that was always going to lead to some amount of fragmentation. I don’t think it’s a bad thing necessarily. For all of the complaints about it, systemd has unified a lot of things that used to be handled through desktop environments and made things less fragmented as a whole.
No the fragmentation is worse now, GNOME wasn't even going to support the same DRM-leasing protocol (needed for VR) that all the other Wayland compositors agreed on until Valve told them it was adamant it wasn't going to support their custom protocol.
Afterstep and Windowmaker were also just window managers (you can kinda argue Windowmaker with the whole GNUSTEP thing, but that never really took off).
I believe ratpoison is the granddaddy of today's tiling desktops, which have a decent following.
GNOME started moving in that direction back in 2.4 release - GNOME 3 was where, for better or worse (my personal opinion for worse) they decided to experiment even further away from the beaten path.
But the seeds of what became GNOME 3 were sown in first 3 releases of GNOME 2, not in widely discussed but unrelated to actual decisions talks about patents.
The fragmented Linux desktop is not really a problem IMO.
People want to customize their desktops. One way that could happen is through having some sort of grand super-flexible window manager than can do anything, and then customize their behavior in some configuration language. Another way is for interested folks to write their window managers in C or whatever language they want. The latter is usually more performant, and has less social coordination overhead, so it was the way things worked out.
I mean, we have Windows and Apple, with all the programmer-hours spent on their window managers, and they aren’t anywhere near as flexible as the open source ecosystem.
GNOME is at least usable now due to a mix of performance improvements over the years and faster hardware, but it still eats RAM (my current session is running at 3.4GB RSS with just the AppIndicators extension).
But, I wonder had GNOME not gone this direction whether the Linux desktop wouldn't be so fragmented as it is now.