You are talking about Android and Chrome OS right?
I agree, those are the top two Linux distributions, and everything else is behind by an absolutely huge margin
Yep. Just browse their documentation, that is the kind of development experience GNOME and KDE were expected to provide, 20 years ago, yet fail short due to Linux distributions fragmentation, the devs using other environments, or still stuck with plain window managers and xterms workflows.
If you mean Red-Hat in regards to GNOME, they have long moved away from Desktop Linux for consumers, as there is no money to be made there.
The Slashdot posts on the matter from those days are quite easy to find.
GNOME like CDE in his day, is good enough for corporate users to connect into Linux servers.
GNOME today is also not the same as GNOME 20 years ago, it got rebooted multiple times with incompatible code, glade was dropped and now people are expected to write their GUIs in code or manual XML code (yes I am aware of the Web based ongoing replacement, what a broken idea for a native desktop), and plenty of other issues that make GNOME in 2023 even less atractive than 20 years ago.
NeXT under Steve Jobs had a maximum of 500 people working with him in .
There has been much more efforts than that in desktop linux.
Yet NeXT delivered a mostly coherent programming platform, back in the 1990s.
One thing NeXT didn't do is to introduce shitloads of useless complexity with fragmentation for the sake of it and half assed solutions on top of that.
NeXT had Steve Jobs. And I don't mean a man of his calibre, I mean a person saying yes and no to features. This is sorely lacking in the open-source world, where they have a total aversion to any kind of structure and oversight.