If we’re looking at the code shipping in Endless OS today, then yes, our desktop is vanilla GNOME Shell with a few hundred patches on top, and yes, as a result, rebasing onto new GNOME releases is a lot of work. But the starting point for Endless OS was not “what’s wrong with GNOME?” but “what would the ideal desktop look like for a new category of users?”.

When Endless began, the goal was to create a new desktop computing product, targeting new computer users in communities which were under-served by existing platforms and products. The company conducted extensive field research, and designed a desktop user interface for those users. Prototypes were made using various different components, including Openbox, but ultimately the decision was made to base the desktop on GNOME, because GNOME provided a collection of components closest to the desired user experience. The key point here is that basing the Endless desktop on GNOME was an implementation detail, made because the GNOME stack is a robust, feature-rich and flexible base for a desktop.

Over time, the strategy shifted away from being based solely around first-party hardware, towards distributing our software a broader set of users using standard desktop and laptop hardware. Around the same time, Endless made the switch from first- and third-party apps packaged as a combination of Debian packages and an in-house system towards using Flatpak for apps, and contributed towards the establishment of Flathub. Part of the motivation for this switch was to get Endless out of the business of packaging other people’s applications, and instead to enable app developers to directly target desktop Linux distributions including, but not limited to, Endless OS.

A side-effect of this change is that our user experience has become somewhat less consistent because we have chosen not to theme apps distributed through Flathub, with the exception of minimize/maximize window controls and a different UI font; and, of course, Flathub offers apps built with many different toolkits. This is still a net positive: our users have access to many more applications than they would have done if we had continued distributing everything ourselves.