@oblomov @mcc Yeah, that's very true, and the biggest problems are social and resources not technical. 30+ years ago when CDE/Motif and ICCCM were being hammered out it was between a handful of large vendors who were serious about the high-end workstation market and were willing to throw people at the problem to make their ecosystem work, quickly. That isnt true today, while there are some vendors selling workstations it's not a huge and growing market that is attracting investment (all the money us going to "AI") so there isn't the same pressure to hammer out protocols and code across the desktops as there was 30+ years ago when X11 had the same problems. It is happening, but much more slowly and with fewer people, eg IIUC accessibility only had one or two volunteer maintainers until like a year ago when RH hired an FTE to be able to effect architectural changes. It's all XKCD 2347 all the way.
It's honestly amazing that the Linux desktops are in any way competitive with MacOS and Windows as both of those have _way_ more people than any of the different Linux desktops, so they can just *do* more.