In fairness I think I do know what they want, which is better support from third-party (and especially proprietary) software vendors. A Linux workstation can be painfully close to perfectly usable for a lot of professionals who have various personal reasons to prefer it to Windows or macOS— reasons you and I would likely emphatically agree with, no less!
There's this hope that if only for the fragmentation, Linux might finally have Photoshop or whatever.
I get it. I've contended with integrating disparate GUI frameworks on my system. I appreciate what Apple's virtual monopoly on app frameworks for macOS allows them to do in terms of accessibility and integrations and UI changes, in rapid, uniform ways.
But you can't impose uniformity on the Linux desktop without draining the oasis, without killing what makes it a breath of fresh air in the first place.
I don't think it's even the UI that's the problem.
The problem is this:
> ./GuitarPro
./GuitarPro: error while loading shared libraries: libssl.so.0.9.8: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
I bought this program several years ago while using a Mint 13 system - it won't run on Mint 20. Maybe I could set up a Docker, or copy the correct version of the libraries, or whatever - maybe it could be coaxed into working, maybe not - but while end users are likely to encounter this kind of roadblock Linux is just a non-starter as a platform for commercial software.
> There's this hope that if only for the fragmentation, Linux might finally have Photoshop or whatever.
If Adobe builds Photoshop for Red Hat and make it run only on Red Hat, people wanting to use Photoshop will install Red Hat. The big problem is what happens when Microsoft makes Excel work perfectly on Ubuntu and only on Ubuntu.
> The big problem is what happens when Microsoft makes Excel work perfectly on Ubuntu and only on Ubuntu.
This is basically how Steam still works, pending the release of SteamOS 3.0, and it hasn't been a problem for other distros. They can sub in their own libs and repackage the thing or use an Ubuntu chroot.
This is what Snap and Flatpak are for though, and I think they'll handle it well, going forward.
There's this hope that if only for the fragmentation, Linux might finally have Photoshop or whatever.
I get it. I've contended with integrating disparate GUI frameworks on my system. I appreciate what Apple's virtual monopoly on app frameworks for macOS allows them to do in terms of accessibility and integrations and UI changes, in rapid, uniform ways.
But you can't impose uniformity on the Linux desktop without draining the oasis, without killing what makes it a breath of fresh air in the first place.