This is a lot like wishing car manufacturers would unify on how to build a car.
And I mean that not as a dismissal. Standards on many things are nice. So is exploring all of the area left open by the standards.
I think it is an open question on whether or not we could have more standards around what a desktop environment should/could be? Unfortunately, I don't know that there is a company in a good position to build out new standards, at the moment. Most of the big companies are largely content to work alone in their world. Maybe build up a sandbox that keeps developers there.
I am ok with desktop environment exploring new ideas and it is very cool that linux allows them to do so (e.g. I myself am a big fan of tiling window managers and it is one of the main things I miss when I am not using linux).
What I am not okay with is myriad of linux window managers which are 99% the same generic window manager. How much effort is being split between KDE/Gnome despite them being essentially the same thing? How much effort was wasted in unity?
Right, this is why I compared it to car manufacturers. At a base level, there is little to no reason to prefer one car to another. Bicycles can be the same. That said, at the ends, there are people that latch on heavily to decisions and small differences in the options.
Now, again to your point, we are all on the same roads. Such that standardizing parts is incredibly valuable.
I /think/ the trap is that standards often act as constraints on the manufacturers. And software is a large industry where constraints are easy to effectively ignore during development. Memory requirements. Safety from malicious actors on the system. Capabilities of different computers. I could probably go on.
I suspect it is worse than that sounds, even, as developers tend to focus on the intrinsic quality of code thinking that is paramount. I hate that sentence, as it makes it sound like I don't think the quality of the code matters. I fully think it does. I also fully think we fall for aesthetic quality of code far more than we do any other quality.
> What I am not okay with is myriad of linux window managers which are 99% the same generic window manager.
Not sure if you were there but this was way worse in the 1990's when Linux was still very young. Every person and their dog wrote a window manager (I know I wrote a shitty one) and until GNOME & KDE there was no DE to standardise around at all.
At least we have 3 or 4 fairly fully fledged desktop environments now as well as a 1000 different window managers.
And I mean that not as a dismissal. Standards on many things are nice. So is exploring all of the area left open by the standards.
I think it is an open question on whether or not we could have more standards around what a desktop environment should/could be? Unfortunately, I don't know that there is a company in a good position to build out new standards, at the moment. Most of the big companies are largely content to work alone in their world. Maybe build up a sandbox that keeps developers there.