alt Hacker News> Is ther eany OS/desktop where you dont pay the "linux tax" when it comes to how the GUI feels?
That'll depend on how much time you want to invest. /r/unixporn has a lot of _beautiful_ looking desktops but almost all of them come with a non-trivial list of configuration files and plugins ... etc.
> or have missed a lot of features that commercial OSes have, installing programs is a mix of flatpaks, APKs, and building from source.
To an extent, this is how things feel on macOS and windows. Some things from the native app store, some things through brew/chocolate and other things are the old "go to example.com/download and then move .app or click .exe" pattern.
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AppImage is the clear winner on the Linux desktop for things that aren't in the repos or for users that are unwilling to engage with apt too much. AppImage provides a macOS like Application experience. Flatpak is on life support; there isn't much going on there but it still works.
> /r/unixporn has a lot of _beautiful_ looking desktops
The emphasis here should be on the word _looking_ instead. A lot of these desktops (majority are hyprland setups) reveal themselves to be superficial jank when you try to do anything remotely commonplace, like connecting to a new wifi network. It's great that windows slide around at 60fps, but if your answer for managing your network is to open the cli, what even is the desktop for?
And I say this as someone who uses Gnome and maintains his own extension forks.