[_dain_]

>The only worthwhile change in desktop environments since the early 2000s has been search as you type launchers.

Add to that: unicode handling, support for bigger displays, mixed-DPI, networking and device discovery is much less of a faff, sound mixing is better, power management and sleep modes much improved. And some other things I'm forgetting.

[ziml77]

There are some people who would exclude all of those an enhancements because they don't care about them (yes, even Unicode, I've seen some people on here argue against supporting anything other than ASCII)

[VorpalWay]

Unicode is a fair point, I do speak a language that has a couple of letters that are affected. And of course many many more people across the world are way more affected by that. I didn't really consider that part of the desktop environment though, but I could see the argument for why it might (the file manager for example will need to deal with it, as would translations in the menus etc).

I was primarily thinking about enhancements in the user interactions. Things you see on a day to day basis. You really don't see if you use unicode, ASCII, ISO-somenumbers, ShiftJIS etc (except when transferring information between systems).

[Cold_Miserable]

That's me. 1 byte ASCII is all that's needed for text.