The desktop is broken because the big players abandoned it. The idea itself is perfectly serviceable, extendable, and usable. It mates well with a CLI. It was n

The desktop is broken because the big players abandoned it. The idea itself is perfectly serviceable, extendable, and usable. It mates well with a CLI. It was nearly (and neatly) solved back in the late 80s / early 90s with System 6 (with plenty of good work done on Systems 7–9; Windows 3.1 was at least consistent, and the fine work done on NeXTSTEP was simply ignored), and ever since then has been left to rot. The fact that the Finder actually did what it was supposed to, including remembering folder / file locations and states, but no longer does (this has been conspicuously left out in every OS X+ release), is good evidence that Apple (and MS, given the state of W10), simply doesn't care. People use the web, people use Spotlight, and they go on without too much complaint, mainly because they don't know that it could be any better. Even simple window management is a disaster — there are W10 systems we use at work for presentations, and it's a crapshoot as to whether a window will expand to fill the screen, allow me to drag it, or do something unexpected when the top bar is used to drag the window to another location. Mac windows no longer expand to fit content. It isn't that the desktop concept has failed — it's been left to die, when it could be the rock-solid basis for any modern interface. This is not progress.