Overview
Windows 11 is sending vast amounts of information about you to Microsoft and its partners. It is intentionally designed to be difficult to set up without a Microsoft account, and the latest push into AI features sends information to Microsoft and embeds watermarks in the resulting files that can potentially be used to identify the user who created them. Apple presumably receives less data from macOS, but the company has been moving to apply its walled garden approach to desktop systems. Many of its features are also crippled without an Apple ID tied to a cloud account. Thankfully, it is still possible to use a computer without a mandatory cloud account by installing a Linux distribution.
Unfortunately, the two major Linux desktop environments (KDE Plasma and Gnome) are increasingly adding features that tie the desktop to the Internet and/or to cloud accounts. In addition, these desktop environments tend to be tightly coupled, in that they have tight interdependencies between individual desktop components. For example, installing the KolourPaint drawing program from the KDE Plasma desktop on Alpine Linux 3.24 requires installing the KWallet password management tool, even if another password manager is already in use.
To ensure the availability of a long-running desktop environment that is both easy to use and easy to maintain, I'm working to develop a set of desktop components that use the Qt graphics toolkit with Python. Each piece of the desktop will be designed using the software engineering principles of high cohesion and loose coupling, enabling individual components to be reused without having to install unwanted extras.