@Maholmire Something has to manage the windows to show the shells and the text files. Plain rio on Plan 9, mjl's qwm on Inferno, then on Linux it's ratpoison everywhere (because it is just a full-screen drawterm into the Plan 9 machine, or a full-screen Inferno window, or a full-screen urxvt) except my desktop machine, which runs fvwm2. On Linux it's fine without X, I use screen/dvtm inside urxvt and am ssh'd somewhere half the time anyway.

The DE obscures all the nice things you can do with a real shell; this is what I'm talking about when I keep saying that YOLD did more damage to Linux than anything else and that Plan 9 is the most comfortable dev environment I have ever used. You can't make programmers and normies happy at the same time any more than you can make another type of tool that pleases both expert users and regular people. Imagine how different top-tier cooking would be if chefs went to the store and all of the pans and knives and appliances, the tools they use to do their jobs, were replaced with user-friendly versions targeting normie cooks. I can't tell the difference between an S-rank chef's knife and an A-rank one (I probably couldn't tell the difference between the S-rank knife and a C-rank knockoff of the A-rank knife), but people that use knives all day can tell.

So for some reason, programmers get these flashy animation desktop systems, the little wifi icon blinks at them, it's impossible to tell what's actually going on because whatever condescending prick designed that icon was worried that words would confuse people, but then the programmers use it. You can't click a command in Morse into the icon to see what's going on.

It's worse than that, though: I want the computer to do something, I tell it what to do. The OS comes with these programs that do various things, little abstractions. If I do the same thing frequently, I can just put it into a script. Then I've taught the machine how to do it, and the computer and I are developing a small language for talking to each other. I get better at writing code, which is how I talk to the machine, and then I write code to produce these programs that make the machine better at talking to me. DEs don't have that: even the ones that are scriptable don't come close.