Comment by okanat

> Or just in general how these people seem to completely forget that desktop usage is largely just an afterthought for Linux and the main usages are phones, servers, small devices and supercomputers.

I think you're right in that most paid developers use/develop for Linux ecosystems do for server or embedded, where they use Linux out of "laziness" since it provides a basics. Then the engineering team implements everything else GUI, webservers etc on top of it. At work I'm a firmware engineer but I can also write quite complex Linux stuff and I occasionally contribute to the Yocto recipes. You really see that Linux ecosystem is really for people who prefer to dig stuff. Dig decade-old email threads, read C source the whole time. Fix and patch weird bugs and pile workaround on top of workaround by forking things. Linux ecosystem really isn't designed to scale to be deployed into wild-west PC universe and still lives in a "here is the source; good luck!" world.

> Even ignoring the future though. It's just the understanding of the “now”. Things like initially libinput having no way to disable mouse acceleration and the developer at first resisting it until receiving a mountain of complaints and finally relenting because “Everyone would want mouse acceleration always on, right?”.

I mean it can be argued where to split and keep libinput as the lower-level library for the embedded engineers (TBH I don't know if embedded engineers really care). However, what I don't understand is: if they are going to split things in a more granular way, why not provide a higher level library for DEs where functions for acceleration etc. are provided as extras.

At the same time, I have a hunch that GNOME could be the reason (AFAIK libinput dev is employed at RedHat with other GNOME devs) and GNOME likes things "lean" i.e. featureless. One of the reasons Wayland has completely surrendered window decoration and we have to use workarounds and hacks like XDG Decoration is GNOME's insistence on offloading everything to clients and vetoing every single compromise (including XDG Decoration, but Valve pushed it AFAIR).

Again I think designing Wayland as a "allocating rectangles on CPU or GPU buffers" protocol/library is okay. But why don't we have a unified higher level "Wayhill" where ex-GNOME DEs define things like what a decorated window is [^], what happens to the crashed application, unified resizing, actual display management and unified configuration so it can be shared with the login manager. Now KDE implements one thing, wl-roots implements another (wl-roots is probably closer to my "Wayhill" idea but it kind of caters to more terminal-driven stuff, I do prefer pure GUI-driven desktops) and GNOME just opposes everything.

I see this kind of "provide the lowest level abstraction, nothing else" as a paradigm in every single component in Linux. It is really tiring both as a desktop user and as a paid developer. Since it is a socio-technic concept, rather than a purely technical, I don't really see that we'll solve it with "more FOSS". The overall mindset needs to change or we need to bootstrap a new ecosystem (which is an uphill battle).

[^]: Yes Firefox and Chrome would look wacky (basically dual decorated) since they use some lower level GNOME/GTK stuff (file dialogs, cairo rendering etc, GTK themes/libadwaita), however this kind of push could have helped browsers to be more agnostic as well.