Back in the day there was a discussions on whether or not building out a massive dependency chain of packages like Debian does is the best approach or not.

It is a huge amount of work do it and you do end up with "dependency hell" were a great deal of time and effort is consumed just by resolving problems that come as a result of this approach.

Like it is a never ending task and it impacts everything everybody does on typical Linux distributions.

It is difficult to overstate this and it is hard to get across because average Linux user just has learned to live with it and finds it perfectly acceptable. Because if they didn't find it acceptable... they wouldn't be a Linux user.

They would be using Mac or Windows or some other OS. Which is exactly what happens every day.

Linux desktop isn't more popular because lots of people haven't tried it. There are a lot of tech people that tried to use Linux and make it work and it just didn't for them. Sometimes its driver or X11 or hardware or user problems... but it is also because a lot of it kinda sucks.

Like back in the early 2000s Linux was well on pace to become a dominate and popular workstation in any sort of tech environment. But then Mac OS X and simply annihilated it. Lots of tech people that would never consider using Macs in the past and were very technical people doing programming and all sorts of stuff on Linux immediately jumped ship once 10.2 was out because it was just a flat out better experience. It wasn't due to lack of experience or not understanding Unix or not being tech savvy enough.

Being tech savvy is why they left. They understood Linux and packages and all that... and they didn't like it. Of course there was lots of other reasons like X11 with graphics drivers or wifi drivers or etc etc.

In the end I could write a entire book about it.

But in the end I like the slackware philosophy on this stuff:

https://docs.slackware.com/slackware:package_and_dependency_management_shouldn_t_put_you_off_slackware

I started off learning Linux on slackware... and it was all a pretty breezy experience.

If I wanted software I would download it and compile it. It wasn't that big of a deal. Sometimes I would need to install dependencies, but it wasn't like a super difficult thing to do.

Just starting off using Linux and a few weeks into it I could build and install stuff this way.

The only problem was that after a few months of installing random things it became a bit of a mess, but nothing a 'rm' or two couldn't fix.

But as I learned more people hyped up things like Debian and how mature and large project is and all the software it had compiled into it and such things.

Switching to Debian was like putting on a straight jacket. Every little thing I tried broke everything. The package management system they used felt downright tyrannical.

But people convinced me that it was "better", so I learned to live with it by adopting "let the baby have it's bobble" approach. Instead of me just doing what I wanted I learned to get a close approximation of it using apt-get and then work within the constrains of the package management system to get the OS to do what I want.

But now I am pretty sure Slackware had the right idea after all.

Also a lot of other people... like people who were against shared libraries and dynamic binaries and such things. In resource constrained systems of the 1980s and 1990s they kinda made sense because it saved on hugely expensive ram and resources.... But I don't think that it has made sense for decades now.

There is really no great reason why you shouldn't be able to just download a executable file and just run it.

And it is the similar thing with Gnome OS and KDE Linux.

Why not have a entire desktop environment that is just downloaded and managed as a single "thing"?

What is wrong with that?

It is the best way to get a consistent polished environment that is shareable with other people. Something that works out of the box with "batteries included" that you don't have to fart around with if you don't feel like it.