Well... For me "modern desktops UIs" happen for few reasons: - the classic desktop design is simply ridiculous. Let's start with icons: they are launchers orga

Well... For me "modern desktops UIs" happen for few reasons: - the classic desktop design is simply ridiculous. Let's start with icons: they are launchers organized mostly in a free form, so they can't be many, but they also get covered anytime you open a windows. Like desktop backgrounds they are an absurdity coming from the idea that the digital desktop must resemble a physical desktop where icons are "tools laid out on the desktop"; - menus, another absurd coming from the paper era where people know labels and hierarchies of suspended folders; - generic "bars" not different than physical desktop pens, paper clips, ... small containers of "many small stuff" to work with. This as a simple first timid step toward a less absurd design. The the floating windows model, born clearly to resemble paper stuff you can move and laid out on a desktop, that's why tiling WM have become popular again after decades. IT standard users at the time of Unity/first Gnome SHell (the double capital is not a typo) have already tried various launchers bar on the left or right side simply because screens from 4:3, 16:10 than 16:9 and now the start of 21:9 makes standard users in need of more vertical space, while the horizontal one start to be abundant. For similar reasons someone have made "sidebars" in apps and some have started the concept of vertically stacked tabs that remain readable even when are many and do not waste vertical screen space. Most standard users back than was already inhabited to "quick launchers" mimicking a CLI as a launcher with some extra/adopted completion, that's why menus disappear substituted by "dashes" and Ubuntu rightly and ignored by many have pushed the HUD for in-app menus as a quick search&narrow. But most are reactionary, at first they fear to "loose something" in a search&narrow setup, while they have already ditched "web directories" for search engines a decade or more before. So the evolution is terribly slow. Do you want to know the desktop of the future than? Well active documents, like org-mode where you can click links that can execute code (elisp:) or specific actions (ol-* link types). Something we have partially had in the past, like with PostScript GUIs or even before with Smalltalk-based workstations and at a slightly limited extent with LispM UI and Plan9 UI where you can just compose menus, buttons etc typing a name in the right place. The modern web winning other widgets-based UIs is the proof we need docs-UIs, but modern web means docsUI in hands of someone else, org-mode is local, the future will be trying to bring back some local aspects in the modern web style and the desktop will be more and more a 2D REPL. The commercial gimmick of Windows that copy Kde and before have tried to patent some GUIs elements to deter FLOSS devs does not really count much in the evolution timeline IMVHO.