> "Meanwhile, there's little consistency between apps (and Elementary tries to remove menu bars as a concept, what's up with that?), and everything feels put together randomly by people with widely divergent ideas of what a kind of desktop environment to aspire to."
This is the product of dictatorship style development on one side (Windows, OSX) Vs democracy on the other side (Linux distros).
It's not democracy vs dictatorship. It's individualism/pluralism vs central planning. You can have central planning with democratic legitimacy or without it.
But I don't actually think the horrible state of desktop Linux is down to any of that. Device drivers are Linux's big problem. Desktop environments are a simple matter of getting used to them and learning what to tweak.
As I said, it's driver issues that make the Linux desktop/laptop experience horrible, not the diversity of desktop environments.
I don't think it's a good idea for Linux advocates to deny or downplay the effect that driver issues have on the overall desktop/laptop Linux experience.
This is the product of dictatorship style development on one side (Windows, OSX) Vs democracy on the other side (Linux distros).
Democracy implies diversity. Dictatorship implies uniformity.
Can you have the uniformity you are looking for within a democracy?
(or some would argue that anarchy would be a better metaphor for the Linux scene)