One of the great things about Linux is how much you can customize your system down to the deepest level. You can switch between different kernels, drivers, desktops, and apps, making everything work just the way you want it to. For most people, though, that will come down to the desktop choice, which often related to what distro you choose, too.

Between GNOME, KDE Plasma, Cinnamon, and so many others, there are a ton of options for the desktop, and while having choice is undoubtedly a good thing, it gets to a point where it can be a problem. And Linux is probably at that point.

Desktop choice becomes distro choice

Finding what you want can be challenging

Technically, the desktop you choose doesn't have to be tied to a specific distro. On most distros, there are multiuple desktop packages you can install, and you can switch between them as needed. But that doesn't change the fact that, when you choose a distro, you're almost always choosing a default desktop as well.

Whether it's Ubuntu, Fedora, Linux Mint, Bazzite, or almost any other distro, when you choose it, you're choosing the desktop you want to start with alongside it. That means that finding the exact desktop and distro you want becomes that much harder. If you want to start with a desktop you like, you may have to give up certain things that a different distro does better.

You may also be looking at more specific desktop customizations that are included by default in some distributions, but then that makes things even more complicated. A lot of distros with more niche or specific features may not have the broad support of more well-known distros, making it hard to know for sure whether you'll still be getting updates in a few years.

Once you're familiar with these concepts, of course, you can customize everything yourself from the start, and something like Arch Linux doesn't even have a default desktop and simply lets you choose one right off the bat. But for a beginner, the overwhelming sea of options can be a deterrent and cause choice paralysis.

Splitting efforts

Desktops have limited support

The thing about having so many options to choose from is that thje community itself becomes increasingly divided, which makes it harder for new features and ideas to be added to all of them. What ends up happening is that a ton of tools you may like only support one specific desktop, and finding alternatives may be next to impossible.

For example, GNOME has its GNOME extensions with a dedicated marketplace, and they can radically change almost everything about your desktop. They can move icons around, change the look of the panel, and even give you a tiling window manager. There's a huge degree of customization here, but once you move to KDE Plasma, all of that is gone.

Instead, KDE has its own kind of customization where you can create multiple panels on each side of the screen and add multiple widgets to them that can enable all kinds of features. Cinnamon has something similar, but notably, these are different systems, so what works on one doesn't necessarily exist for the other.

That split in the community means that a wide range of tools may never be available a big subset of the Linux community, and that just isn't a problem on Windows, where everyone has the same base. And keep in mind, GNOME, KDE, and Cinnamon are some of the biggest and most popular desktops out there. There are so many more options that don't get close to that level of support, making them very hard to maintain.

A great example is COSMIC, which was born after the developers of Pop! OS decided to split from GNOME. COSMIC is a genuinely promising desktop with some cool features of its own, but many of the things it wants to do just have no community support behind them right now because it's such a new platform with so few users. COSMIC feels heavily hampered as a result.

How many will survive?

Small communities can result

That's not even considering the fact that so many desktops can be born simply out of spite or due to small divergences from an original team. Both Cinnamon and COSMIC were born through similar processes, and while these may be able to sustain themselves in the long run, a lot of other options may end up falling by the wayside when the community that started the project abandons it.

Take Nitrux, for example. This Linux distro used to be based on older releases of KDE Plasma, injecting them with a heavy amount of customization to create a custom shell. When the old versions of KDE Plasma it relied on stopped being supported, the team tried to create its own shell with Maui, but the team simply wasn't able to sustain development of a full desktop experience all on its own. Eventually, the distro settled for using the Hyprland desktop instead.

That's what happens when everyone has a slightly different vision of what they want and tried to make something new. Sometimes, having a niche community isn't a bad thing, but with something as foundational as a desktop, it's important for a project to have legs to stand on and move forward for a long time. Just as Maui Shell ended up being left behind, many other desktops may meet a similar fate in the long run.

It's best to play it safe

If you're considering switching to Linux or you're relatively new to it, your best bet is to stick with a desktop environment that has proven its popularity and that it will be maintained for a long time to come. Options like GNOME, KDE Plasma, or Cinnamon are all great examples of desktops that have stood the test of time and will likely keep getting support well into the future. It's best to familiarize yourself with the customization tools and make these desktops work for you than to try and find something more unique or overly niche. This way, you can be sure you'll be supported for a lot longer and you won't have to worry as much about your workflow being broken at some point.