Etc Etera
Authored Comments
While I can work with the GUI options there are in the Linux world (my current choice being the Cinnamon DE on sufficiently capable machines and Xfce on less capable ones), I do think the state of the Linux desktop could be significantly better today if the approach wouldn't primarily have been to catch up with Windows for so long, with the one major exception, Gnome 3, being set out on suddenly making everything different, but without functionality being an objective and without usability, if it even was an objective, being achieved.
No matter which Linux desktop I choose, compared to IBM OS/2's now ancient Workplace Shell it still looks and feels like a loosely connected appendage to the base OS, not like being an integral, closely connected part of the underlying OS like the WPS used to. Of course Windows isn't much different there, either – starting with XP, they made the UI more colorful and flashier with each version, but neither more functional nor more usable, especially not for what one may want to call power users or IT professionals.
In IBM's WPS, everything was an 'object' of a specific 'class' and everything was closely linked – so that a desktop icon (WPS object) which impersonated a specific file (file object) kept that relationship everytime the file moved to another location in the file system. 25 years ago. And the behavior of every object of a certain class, like the 'folder' class, could be changed and extended by subclassing and attaching additional functionality to the new subclass, be it the way it was displayed on the desktop or the functions which could be executed on it.
Neither that functionality nor the usability of the WPS has been achieved with any of today's desktop implementations on either Windows or Linux.
I have to use Windows 10 on my day job as a programmer (the projects I work on, though, are Java applications which will finally be deployed on Linux machines). At home and for my sideline business, I use Linux exclusively – with the exception of three or four Windows applications I still need, which either run on Wine or in a Windows 7 VM.