It seems Linux is stuck in two worlds, never the Twain shall meet:
1. Engineers who are great at code, bad at UI and UX (unless your tastes are 1990s-2000s styles, you do you, but watch your market share always be niche. Reeducating the populace to see the superiority of your preferences compared to Apple is never going to happen.)
2. Engineers who are great at UI and UX but sloppy at fundamentals - take elementaryOS. Looks gorgeous, but every new release takes a complete reinstall, which is the most user-unfriendly way of doing a basic distribution task.
I’ve just learned to accept that Linux on the desktop is never going to happen.
It's more granular than that. Engineers who are good at UI are often really bad at UX. Very often with Linux the UX has been sacrificed to some snazzy new look (Gnome 3 and Unity) with horrible UX. Meanwhile UX is quite seriously good in environments that look plain, such as XFCE.
But using KDE, Gnome, XFCE or Mate and then popping into the modern Windows' hellscape shows that actually Linux on the Desktop is already here and pretty damned good.
I installed EOS on my dad's old computer. He is stuck on an old version because he is not technical enough to do a re-install. I pretty much swore it off after that issue.
Seems like the ideal is for group 2 to be producing the DE and working in concert with group 1 who's responsible for the distro. How exactly to arrive at this result is another question.
1. Engineers who are great at code, bad at UI and UX (unless your tastes are 1990s-2000s styles, you do you, but watch your market share always be niche. Reeducating the populace to see the superiority of your preferences compared to Apple is never going to happen.)
2. Engineers who are great at UI and UX but sloppy at fundamentals - take elementaryOS. Looks gorgeous, but every new release takes a complete reinstall, which is the most user-unfriendly way of doing a basic distribution task.
I’ve just learned to accept that Linux on the desktop is never going to happen.