I somewhat agree with you. I think in many ways desktop usage hasn't seen much improvement in the last 10 to 15 years or so - at least not the kind of improvem

I somewhat agree with you. I think in many ways desktop usage hasn't seen much improvement in the last 10 to 15 years or so - at least not the kind of improvement that really opens new possibilities to the user. At least from my view - there was a wave of change in priorities that started happening in the early 2000s. Previously, most applications were expected to be single user, offline first, thick clients. At best, every now and then they would send a payload over the network (like syncing with a mail server, or publishing a new revision of a document). The internet speed-up changed everything. To the point where I would argue that the browser is the real desktop environment in most modern computer work. Documents moved online first, email syncing became real time chat/voice/video. The majority of my day to day application usage is through a website, or a desktop application that's really hiding that fact that it's a website (ex: anything based on a webview). We still need some foundational pieces that the OS provides, but the DE doesn't matter quite so much when compared to the browser - so companies have been hugely under-investing in this space. Most of the work isn't in user-facing improvements, it's in core pieces that facilitate online/browser based interactions. If you want to know where all the desktop improvements are... they went to IE, V8, and Chromium (for good or for bad). In a major way - I think this is why linux desktop is actually so compelling these days. It can run a browser just fine, and by extension access basically all the software a user might need (utterly different from running linux in 2005, where you often had to use completely different, often incompatible software). Games were one of the last stumbling blocks, and Valve has bitten the bullet and really pushed on that front. --- My hunch is that this isn't going to change unless something like AR/VR (or some other new input/output) genuinely becomes mainstream. In which case we're going to see another wave of interest in UX/UI on the desktop.