alt Hacker NewsHow many years did it take to make a well-polished DE on desktop Linux? How large was the community doing that and how many devices did they have access to?
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pjmlp • today at 7:16 AM
About 5 years, Mandrake and SuSE with KDE around 1996 were already quite good.
Since then the problem has always been the same, rebooting the DE experience for the sake of it, desktop environment wars, rebooting the development stack from GNOME and KDE, and the problem that despite all OEMs have Linux running on their data centers, the community has to reverse engineer the hardware from the same OEMs.
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The difference is that there is already a great open source smartphone OS that works today, it’s AOSP.
The most effective path would be for the FLOSS ecosystem to pour their resources into making AOSP independent from Google. But instead people will just fork N half- or non-working solutions for reasons.