Desktop Linux — The Case for a Single Distro

This could be the year for “Desktop Linux” with so many engineers at home looking to contribute to open source projects.

I have a selfish request: A Single Linux Desktop.

Let’s start by looking at how deep the desktop fragmentation goes with just the top four distributions at this time:

• MX Linux — Xfce and KDE
• Manjaro — Xfce, KDE and GNOME
• Mint — Xfce, Cinnamon, MATE,
• Ubuntu — Xfce, MATE, GNOME, KDE etc.

Given the list above we have a four distributions and more than a dozen total flavours of a desktop environment!

The fragmentation of developer resources which are already constrained and rely on dedication outside of their core employment is central to this issue. Consolidation, focus and direction from a single entity could really move the needle with the quality and polish of desktop linux.

For a team to work, developers need to feel like heroes. They want the same things as users, they are users, they were “only” users to start with. At some stage they decide to get involved and they start investing time, efforts and emotions into improving our project. What they’re looking for the most is support and happiness. They need feedback and information to understand bugs or feature requests and when they’re done implementing something, they need to feel like heroes, they literally do, that’s part of the reason they’re here really.

I can show them 500 people donated money last month, I can forward emails to the team where people tell me how much they love Linux Mint, I can tell them they’re making a difference but there’s nothing like interacting directly with a happy user, seeing first-hand somebody be delighted with what you worked on. How our community interacts with our developers is key, to their work, to their happiness and to their motivation. — Clement Lefebvre, leader of the Linux Mint project.

Flatpak have started the initiative to move in this direction of single distribution mechanism for apps, but one could argue this is a biproduct of fragmentation.

In a world of Chromebooks and virtualized/web apps, the need for customization and multiple flavours is dwindling — we are good with the browser running smoothly.

What we need is snappy window management, smooth scrolling and simply a beautiful environment.

I’m Rob Sandhu and I just released wisecast.fm, a brand new podcast hosting platform featuring machine learning insights on your podcast downloads and the ability to create podcast videos on the fly for YouTube.