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I remember back in the gnome2 days there was still a lot of fragmentation. Gnome, KDE, WindowMaker, AfterStep, Enlightenment, ratpoison.

Linux has always appealed to tinkerers and that was always going to lead to some amount of fragmentation. I don’t think it’s a bad thing necessarily. For all of the complaints about it, systemd has unified a lot of things that used to be handled through desktop environments and made things less fragmented as a whole.

discuss

ChocolateGod|7 months ago

No the fragmentation is worse now, GNOME wasn't even going to support the same DRM-leasing protocol (needed for VR) that all the other Wayland compositors agreed on until Valve told them it was adamant it wasn't going to support their custom protocol.

77pt77|7 months ago

> ratpoison

That's a really fringe window manager.

Not a desktop environment like the others.

spauldo|7 months ago

Afterstep and Windowmaker were also just window managers (you can kinda argue Windowmaker with the whole GNUSTEP thing, but that never really took off).

I believe ratpoison is the granddaddy of today's tiling desktops, which have a decent following.