[rkv]

Comparing Windows and macOS to Linux is moot and we should stop doing it. Linux has always been and will continue to be an ecosystem driven by various communities, and expecting everyone to agree on the same standards is silly.

The sooner we all begin treating Ubuntu and Red Hat Enterprise Linux as separate Operating Systems the sooner we can all move on from the "single standard" and "Linux on Desktop" debates. As an application vendor I always find it amusing when customers ask if we support Linux. My response is no, we don't support Linux but we do support Ubuntu 18+ and RHEL 8. Linux distros are so wildly different these days, not just in software but in ideologies, that this distinction is important, and there's nothing wrong with that.

[sph]

Not in 2022 they're considered different Operating Systems. People have been developing AppImage, Flatpak and snap for a reason. They're being used and it's a thing.

Yeah, the year of the Linux desktop isn't coming, but it's not 2001 either. We've standardised onto a few technologies pretty much everyone adopt except the ones that want to be different: systemd, Flatpak being the most used cross-distro system, pulseaudio (and pipewire offers a 100%-compatible shim for it), dbus, NetworkManager and now finally with GNOME 42/libadwaita we can have even standardised UI design.

And like many other things frontend, things move at a pretty rapid pace. Ubuntu 18 is ancient, might be good for a server, but it's not a good idea to use that as a metric for where the Linux desktop is.