Man, we really need to make “The Church Cathedral and the Bazaar” required reading.

You clearly have missed the entire point of Linux, which is the freedom to do with your machine as you like. The endless number of choices for specific tastes is the result of people having the choice to write their own thing.

When consolidation happens, when people say “make my choice for me, I can’t make decisions” we end up with super constrained setups like MacOS, Windows 11 and stupid Gnome the way it is now; no choice, do it our way or not at all.

And the answer is still freedom. It’s obvious in the plugins and addons for gnome that get it to do basic customizing you find in, say xfce as a toggle in the settings. You find it in the myriad of softwares written for windows and mac that let the user do what they want to do.

And I will likely not be the first to point out to you Linux doesn’t “aim for desktops”, linux isn’t an organization the way ms and apple are. And it likely never will be.

Newbies will be scared and confused no matter what’s in front of them.