> A (high-quality) monoculture is actually much much easier on most web devs, because it minimizes the number of browsers they have to support for quirks.
Short-term, sure. Long-term it opens devs to Google's whims and makes the "open" web barely more open than Apple's AppStore.
But that's short-term vs long-term thinking and I can't deny most would prioritize the short-term. Here's hoping there's still enough idealists, even among web devs to avoid that fate and bring about for the web what GNU did for UNIX in the 80/90s.
GNU did great things for UNIX. It hasn't really demonstrated much utility in the user experience improvement space. The flow there, in general, appears to be that the big, closed source commercial interests devise new approaches for user interface operation and the open source community copies the ones that work.
The only space I can name off the top of my head where my open-source architectures have outstripped Windows and Mac in UX is virtual desktops.
If you're taking casual computer experience, KDE's still way more customizable than any of the commercial desktop environments out there.
Of course proprietary software has more funding to hire designers and such, but in terms of actual functionality, I'd contest your claim.
If you're talking developer user experience, it's not even a race. The FLOSS ecosystem has a landslide lead here. In fact the whole point of WSL is to try to keep devs on the Windows platform by bringing that experience to Windows more directly.
Short-term, sure. Long-term it opens devs to Google's whims and makes the "open" web barely more open than Apple's AppStore.
But that's short-term vs long-term thinking and I can't deny most would prioritize the short-term. Here's hoping there's still enough idealists, even among web devs to avoid that fate and bring about for the web what GNU did for UNIX in the 80/90s.