+1, people forget that open source software came before everything else, and that linux was never "an alternative", it was a continuation of UNIX on PC hardware.
Closed source operating systems never really were able to become an alternative to open source software, because they were never meant as computer operating systems. There was DOS, and that did a fine job, and there was a plethora of very productive and easy to use software for DOS, that was also not overly expensive and had a lot of functionality, like WordPerfect 5.1, Framework 2.0, Harvard Graphics, dBaseIII, etc...
Apple had found the ideal way to make money on application software: they made a GUI shell for their operating system. That way, software manufacturers would have to "integrate" into that GUI to sell software for Apple computers, and Apple could up the profit margin from that. In the early nineties, a MacIntosh was an expensive computer to run, the hardware was already crazily expensive, and it needed a whopping 8 MB of RAM to run well, which was a multiple thousand dollars investment at that time. A MacIntosh as daily driver was an 8 to 10 thousand dollar investment. And Apple made money on every piece of software and hardware.
Microsoft saw that, and they didn't have a system like Apple that could make money out of everything, and their software ran on "IBM clones", which were cheaper computers, so they had a real problem. They wanted to steal the market away from WordPerfect and AstonTate etc..., but they didn't have anywhere near competing products, in comparison to WordPerfect, Word was a laugh, they didn't have anything to compete with Lotus Notes, they didn't have anything to compete with Harvard Graphics, etc... so they made a GUI shell on top of DOS, so that everything would also need to be integrated, so that uses would see colors and a Mac-like GUI shell, but if they would start up their WordPerfect, they would be frustrated because they didn't see the colors anymore. That was the sole purpose of the Windows operating system, to sell Microsoft applications without the need to have better applications. It took years for Microsoft to even come near to the features of the third party DOS-applications they bullied out of the market by releasing Windows, and they never got to the same performance level because of all of their bloatware, but that was the one and only reason why Microsoft made Windows, it was never meant as an operating system, it was meant as a fancy scheme to lock down application software and make more profit. A few years later, they realized that it would not be possible to compete with Apple by holding on to DOS as underlying operating system, and they needed something new, and they made a deal with IBM to rebrand IBM's OS/2 (which was IBM's take on creating a locked down DOS-based GUI operating system to sell it's own application software, but it was more technically sound than Microsoft Windows) into Windows NT, and now 20 years later, they're still using that very same pseudo-operating system, that was never meant to be a real operating system, to sell their application software to the world.
While the "OS wars" between Apple and Microsoft started, linux was just an adaptation of a real power-computing orientated operating system, UNIX, to the new and cheaper "IBM clone" hardware. It was a great success, because at that time, the internet was unlocked to UNIX users, and they collaborated on the Internet and a lot of side shows and applications software was developed at an incredible pace, all thanks to the fast communication and collaboration through the Internet. Linux is only a kernel, distros were built, applications were written, development environments were created on affordable x86-hardware, and the whole world started creating great open source software together. In the last 20 years, so much software has been created by the open source community, that it's not even possible to make an overview.
Several years later, a clever open source developer made a port of some UNIX applications to Windows and Mac "consumer platforms", just for fun and as a proof of concept. One of the things that were ported over from linux/UNIX/BSD/..., was Navigator, a third generation html browser. It was an instant commercial success on commercial operating systems, and the rest is history.
When Windows took over the Apple market because Apple hardware was too expensive and IBM clones were becoming much cheaper, Apple fired Jobs, it was Jobs that had devised the cunning "fake OS to lock down application software" plans. Jobs took it a step further, and stole a real operating system, the open source UNIX-clone BSD, to develop a POSIX-standard compliant, UNIX-like operating system with the same locked down GUI as MacOS, and that became BeOS, and when he was later hired back by Apple, that became OSX. So Apple now has a real operating system.
Microsoft has never bothered turning Windows into a real operating system, it has always remained basically a software store and DRM-layer packed as a GUI shell on DOS, and the only thing they did to make it more presentable, is to adopt IBM's OS/2, which was like the "enterprise version" of DOS, as a base, because it has a few more features than the 35+ year old DOS, but they still use pretty much the same filesystems as DOS, the same basic structure, the same limited features, etc... DOS was made as a simplified operating system for smaller consumer hardware, pretty much the Android of its time, something everybody could easily use, that could start a couple of games, etc... it's a very basic storage management system, to allow users to load programs from diskettes into the computer's RAM to be executed. That's why it's called "Disk Operating System". It was never created as a serious computing operating system.
So there is a world of difference between open source software and commercial "pseudo-OS's", but because of the fact that people don't realize that Windows isn't a real OS, but only the Microsoft version of the Steam client, linux and open source software is degraded as an "alternative". That makes commercial companies exploit linux, because it can also be an alternative of course, qui peut le plus, peut le moins, and that, together with the fact that open source is always degraded as an "alternative" to crappy locked down consumer software that doesn't even do 1 % of what serious open source software can do, is very demoralizing for open source developers, because they see everything taken away from them: their Internet, which at the time has strict bandwidth rules and everything was very nice and civilized, and now they can't get anything done any more because the entire US is killing bandwidth with mindless media consumption like netflix and stuff, their freedom, at the time they were really free to be creative and innovative, but now, they're spied upon, sabotaged, depicted as hackers, and any form of innovation is criticized as terrorism or ungodly anti-patriotism, and now that many of them have been working like crazy for 20 years to get to the top in the enterprise they work for, the whole thing either comes down, or the shareholders see new commercial opportunities in open source and hire some commercial software guru to take that board position they were working 20 years for to reach.
And as with everything, in the end, there is only one factor that counts: the human factor. Steve Ballmer's drones at Microsoft might be shouting "we love you Steve" during his abdication speech, but they're either on drugs or very perverted, and one thing is for sure: there is not one single serious developer amongst those drones. Microsoft is fighting freedom and affordable technology and education and knowledge with a bunch of non-creative drones that aren't even worth mentioning in relation to software, and they're winning, not on the field of technology, but in court and congress. And the linux foundation does nothing, because it's not their show, because windows is not an operating system. And they're right, Windows is not an operating system, and is nothing but a retarded locked down digital distribution channel that people actually pay for, but the newer generation only knows Windows, so linux has to do something about that, the new generation has never seen UNIX, doesn't know about WordPerfect, doesn't care about DOS, they don't know the full story, they weren't there. They never knew that before the mid 90's, you couldn't find a single school or university on earth that ran a single Windows or Mac PC, because they all took computing seriously and needed a powerful real computing operating system, so they ran UNIX. In the beginning of the 90's, it was unthinkable that a computer engineering student would use Windows or Mac, computing was a serious scientific thing, it was governed only by open source software and UNIX-like operating systems. That is different now, educational institutions are sponsored by software console vendors like Microsoft or Apple, and that means that the next generation of software devs will start out with a serious disadvantage and a serious misconception. So I think that the open source community has to start taking the handicap of the newer generations into account. There is a knowledge deficit, and it will be harder for young people to invest themselves, with all of the distractions that are going on now, and that were never an issue in the old days. But I'm still very positive about the capabilities of the open source community to adapt. They've always succeeded in adapting the inadaptable, they will also succeed this time around. Projects like Manjaro prove that, and luckily, those projects have to compete with older projects like Arch and Mint/Ubuntu, just to make sure they keep on the right track and stay for real.
For people that knew the old days, well, it's always the same story, those days will never come back. 15 years ago, linux users were admired because they could communicate in real time over the internet, something few people could do. Now, linux users are being frowned upon and put on blacklists by ISPs and governments because they have the power to potentially do something bad or aren't considered "consumers" or "home users" by ISPs, but have to take an enterprise subscription. Two years from now, linux users will be admired again, as they are now in the enterprise world, because they can actually make computers work, and avoid the enormous quality problems commercial closed software is having ever more of, and because they can save people money.
And that's where it's going: the economy doesn't need the big computing innovations for the moment, they need to reduce overhead, and that's where open source devs need to swallow their pride and just offer their open source solutions as an "alternative", that's better quality, stable, cheaper, less overhead and more efficiency, and that's also something open source can do, and it's much easier for open source to play the underdog and accept being an "alternative", than for a closed source commercial software console to reduce overhead and "just work" and be efficient.
And once the point of general acceptance as an "alternative" is reached, even if that means that some crappy code is merged in some applications, that's where open source will have won, because at that point, the power of real computing is everywhere, and innovation will automatically start to happen again. It's just frustrating that it take so long.
So to come back to the OP, this was not a thread hijack, all of this is actually a broader answer to your question. Linux DE's are just applications, there are dozens of those, you have a huge choice and each and every one of them is crazily customizable. It's just not like Windows, there is no "default theme" or no "default setting" or no "Microsoft color scheme of the week", everything is there to personalize by each and every user, because open source can...
