Guessing wildly: 1. The linux desktop has been reworked so hard and so many times to try and attract and accomodate those good ol' "my mom uses linux!" as a me

Guessing wildly: 1. The linux desktop has been reworked so hard and so many times to try and attract and accomodate those good ol' "my mom uses linux!" as a means of obtaining critical mass for the other things (drivers, well-polished software, ...). The few that this model attract are equally fine with their smartphone and a laptop built around a browser. 2. From (1), it is not even an attractive target for dev- work. I used Linux as a my main "desktop" from the days of downloading slackware over BBS in the early 90ies up until I was introduced to OSX around 10.4. I tried going back after Apple making it increasingly more awful after 10.6. I hated every minute of it - all the things I hated with new OSX was replicated, poorly. an endless stream of internal frustration "no I don't want to automount this usb stick what is wrong with you?", "why is my volume settings jumping around", "yes I plugged in a device, I don't need to be notified that I did what I did please shut up", "oh so two audio feeds with different sample rates are a no go?", "my mouse is low on batteries? I'm not using it, it's not even connected?", "hotplug monitor? enjoy panic and reboot", "I know there's updates to be had, there's always updates to be had, fuck off - daddy's working". I waste more time turning things off than I previously ever had to do turning things on. Now my (non-NIH) regular linux desktop use is confined to VMs that I just reset from template, do my thing and then murder. 3. Not even 'cool' anymore. The 'fragmentation' of the desktop was an attractive feature to young me. Jumping between WindowMaker to Enlightenment to KDE opened a lot of ideas as to what this thing could be used for, I enjoyed tinkering (still do, but not on this chimera). Now they are all convering into mostly the same confused pig but with different shades of lipstick. The same useless animations and effects and none of the useful ones. "We" lost the mobile race (and never really took to participating) and payed the price with what is effectively a kernel fork. There's a good chance that VR can actually turn into the next "Desktop" (displays are nearly there, eyetrackers, haptic gloves etc. incoming) to make the browser look more pathetic. How many projects are seriously working on it, or is that already lost?