It's a hangover of the old convergence mindset. Everything's going to become a tablet webapp, and Linux is finally going to be used by Average Folks. (That's w

It's a hangover of the old convergence mindset. Everything's going to become a tablet webapp, and Linux is finally going to be used by Average Folks. (That's why GNOME is basically a touch-based tablet DE.) In my opinion, that's a doomed vision, both technologically and in what will occur. You can't have convergence; you can't collapse UIs or OSes down to the lowest common denominator (a mobile tablet) and have it be as good on a desktop as a UI or an OS meant for a desktop. Moreover, Linux is, and will (sadly?) remain, an "engineering OS", which is great for developers and technical people but comparatively alien and limited for Average Folk (probably for the same metaphysical reasons as the UI/OS problem). You could say that Linux caters to the extremes: users who are SO simple that they don't even notice what OS they're on (they don't need to interface with AAA games or Netflix because they just "play sudoku") and users who are advanced enough to benefit from its technical focus. (But then again, the simple case is equally catered to by every OS, so I think "engineering OS" is the best way to look at it.) Average Folks are in the middle; they'll never touch a command line, and they want to play World of Warcraft or Call of Duty. Your actual Linux user is either a programmer or a sysadmin, either professional or amateur. They're statistically the most likely segment of the population to actually be on a desktop computer with multiple monitors and to be finicky about DE features, and that's precisely the user GNOME targets the least due to some mix of fumes of the Converge era and the "developer first" convenience of just not having features and keeping things simple and changing them at will, downstream be damned (GTK4+).