Nice post, thanks!

My €0.02 - About the time that MS introduced "Software Assurance" (2002 or
so?) I headed up a team to develop an "Enterprise Linux Desktop", and we
had great success. Although we didn't manage to fully execute on our
mission (deploy to 10.000 workstations for organization I was working for)
our Proof of Concept was sufficiently slick, workable, and manageable that
a bunch of demo's to the MS commercial team that were playing hardball with
us resulted in increasingly worried faces in the room, and eventually,
deep, long term discounts. This was repeated a few times during the
following years for different organizations.

Linux worked, was actually easier to make work on a large scale over MS
software, and customizing, deploying and managing desktop systems was a
_breeze_

It goes without saying that Linux (KDE) was the only desktop environment I
used on all machines under my control.

About 5 to 6 years ago, I came to a point where I found that I was spending
more time making things work then actually using them, and a while later,
reluctantly, I switched my main desktop environment to Windows. I manage a
good number of servers, with the vast majority of them running Linux, but
desktops? Windows all the way. Gnome developed exactly along the path I
suspected it would which is why I avoided it - Miguel de Icaza being an
early incarnation of Lennart. (although I am very happy with the Midnight
Commander...), and although KDE is a lot more agreeable to my tastes, there
is simply too much tweaking and day to day little hassles - I have a job to
do, and my PC is the tool I need to do this job - it needs to Just Work(tm)

Whilst I am still utterly amazed with how awesome Linux servers are, I
don't think we will ever get there with desktops.

On 11 February 2015 at 18:25, Nate Bargmann <n0nb@???> wrote:

> John is a long-time Debian developer who opines on the complexity he
> faces in Jessie:
>
>
> http://changelog.complete.org/archives/9299-has-modern-linux-lost-its-way-some-thoughts-on-jessie
>
> John clearly states that he believes the problems are distinct from
> systemd. While many here may not necessarily agree, I do agree that
> various aspects of the system have become, if not complex, at least more
> opaque than in the past. I overlooked a lot of this as it gained me
> some shiny desktop features (I do like easily mounting of removable
> media and selecting a WiFi AP from my desktop GUI) but I see that left
> unchecked we now have an ever growing level of complexity.
>
> Like John, I don't wish to spark a systemd flame war as that has been
> done to death. Instead, I think it would be wise for Devuan to lead the
> way, after Jessie most likely, toward engineering a distribution that is
> coherent and approachable by cherry-picking packages that maintain
> current functionality along with reasonable configuration and
> documentation. Jude et. al. seem to be working in such a direction for
> device configuration. I'm also pleased with the decision to have Xfce
> as the default DE. Kudos!
>
> Perhaps, I'm not expressing myself as well as I would like. Perhaps
> this is more an issue of poor documentation from upstreams. Yet I also
> see what seems to be needless complexity in configuration. Plus there
> is complexity in dependencies between packages and then complexity in
> IPC (dbus?).
>
> I think what has bothered me the most over the past few years is the
> churn and what sometimes seems to be adoption and then replacement of a
> technology without explanation (consolekit to polkit, for example, devfs
> to udev for another). Some of this is explained away as needed support
> for desktop environments which are moving quickly. Okay, but when did
> the community abandon some level of desire for stability?
>
> Yes, I'm rambling because, as I posted to John's blog post, I feel
> helpless and lost with a lot of this. I realize that convenience comes
> at a price. For example, Network Manager makes a lot of things quite
> handy, but at the cost of being able to dig through a lot of what it
> does when something doesn't go quite right. Yes, I know that Slackware
> is out there (I started with Slackware in 1996), but I am so spoiled by
> apt that I don't wish to abandon it just yet. I'm also loathe to throw
> away my 18+ years of Linux and GNU experience for *BSD at this time.
>
> - Nate
>
> --
>
> "The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all
> possible worlds. The pessimist fears this is true."
>
> Ham radio, Linux, bikes, and more: http://www.n0nb.us
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