[hakfoo]

The "big desktop" concept always felt a little weird to me-- derived from the era where we people freaking out about the license status of KDE/Qt and using that to justify the entire GNOME ecosystem.

It's completely unlike the traditional Unix/X11 model-- here's an entire suite of toolkits and software, and you can pick best-of-breed. If you want to style it all to look similar, tooling exists. If you want your word processor to follow GTK conventions and your web browser to look like Motif, more power to you.

I feel like the original "desktop" model was to provide a basic subset of software with a consistent look and feel-- more or less getting you to feature-parity with the pack-in software in a Windows 95 install. It's realistically the upper bound on what can be offered.

If you go bigger-- as GNOME is doing by hitting the windowing infrastructure itself-- you're asking to support and rebuild the entire world in your image. You also create a hostility with the rest of the universe. I've tended to avoid GNOME/KDE related utilities because I don't want to turn "oh, here's one cool package I want" into 45 minutes of pulling an entire desktop environment down to support it. And that's with abundant resources to spare-- if I was fitting stuff on a first-generation Raspberry Pi with a tiny storage card, it's a complete showstopper.