>“I wish we were better at having a standardised desktop that goes across all the distributions. This is not a kernel issue; it’s more of a personal annoyance of how the fragmentation among different vendors has perhaps held the desktop back a bit,” said Torvalds in a TFiR interview in 2018.

This Torvalds guy is right. If you try to write a tutorial for how to do something in Linux, you will be in a world of pain, because users aren't using Linux, they're using apps that are using Linux.

Can I write "click on the start menu at the bottom left"? I can't. Because first of all nobody even officially calls it the start menu as Windows does. Sometimes the taskbar is at the top, other times it's at the left. Can I say press windows key (I mean, the super key (I mean, the meta key)) to bring up the application launcher? I can't do that either, because it depends on the distro's default configs. Can I say Ctrl+Alt+T brings up the terminal? Who knows! At least, surely, all of these distros are GNU/Linux so I can rely on bash commands being available everywhere, right? But then if I'm writing a tutorial for SSH'ing into a server, and the server is running FreeBSD, now the commands are the same but the arguments are different! And I know FreeBSD isn't Linux but it surely is weird that all these things that are similar but different are different from that thing that is also similar but different.

Meanwhile if you write a tutorial for Windows XP, it still works in Windows 11 because the system GUI and tools barely changed.

This is an advantage in volunteered end user documentation that Linux can't enjoy, because any step-by-step tutorial for Linux would have to be written for every single distro, or become or a ridiculously convoluted mess. And with Waylands that is only going to get worse.

Personally I'm not really counting on Linux desktop gaining popularity because, with all honesty, I found the GUIs of almost every Linux application I tried just terribly poor. Maybe this is because from I'm from XP era when lists and buttons were tightly packed into forms without all this auto-save switches nonsense, but in my mind, if Windows is losing users as they abandon their old GUIs and move into this same waste-of-space-fest (although that's probably not the reason for it), then maybe Linux should just make their GUIs like old windows instead of making them like new windows.

I don't see the reason why so many of these apps lack a main menu, for example. When an app has a main menu, and I can't find a function in the main menu, I just go "well, guess it just can't do that." But now I'm just wasting my time looking around the screen seeing if there is something I can click to do what I want. And right click often doesn't do anything. Where are my context menus? And where are my tooltips? This isn't designed for desktops, is it? It's designed for tablets. I just don't think going from Windows 11 to Windows 8 is much of an improvement. It's like you made a CLI tool without --help. In KDE Discover if I press F1 do I get a manual? No, I get the About screen.

Please do not make applications thinking the user can just Google it if they're stuck when if you Google "how to do X in Linux" you get 99 different solutions that don't work for your distro.