You know, I think part of the problem is that a lot of the leaders of the Linux desktop experience are building these large, complex structures and applications where they are not needed. The best Linux desktop wouldn't be the one that solves all of our problems by specifically considering them, it'd be one that solves them by obviating them.
Now, I'll admit, I'm a minimalist. I use Arch Linux, run no end-user applications except Emacs and Chrome (and I use w3m as the browser often enough), dwm for window manager, and so on. But really it seems that the enormous complexity of these new solutions makes them near-impossible to support. PulseAudio, PolicyKit --- all of these had working systems that were far, far simpler. Maybe instead of PulseAudio, we needed to look at the ALSA code, clean it up, and add the few features people really cared about (per-application volume control) there. Yes, the semantic desktop might be this great pie-in-the-sky result. But really, too complex. Unity, Gnome3? Same thing. We don't need Wayland, we need to simplify and clean up X.Org (something, admittedly, that /has/ been happening. X.Org is the one of those software packages that /does/ improve monotonically with every release). We don't need the total solution to all our problems. We need to simplify and polish what we have now.
Now, I'll admit, I'm a minimalist. I use Arch Linux, run no end-user applications except Emacs and Chrome (and I use w3m as the browser often enough), dwm for window manager, and so on. But really it seems that the enormous complexity of these new solutions makes them near-impossible to support. PulseAudio, PolicyKit --- all of these had working systems that were far, far simpler. Maybe instead of PulseAudio, we needed to look at the ALSA code, clean it up, and add the few features people really cared about (per-application volume control) there. Yes, the semantic desktop might be this great pie-in-the-sky result. But really, too complex. Unity, Gnome3? Same thing. We don't need Wayland, we need to simplify and clean up X.Org (something, admittedly, that /has/ been happening. X.Org is the one of those software packages that /does/ improve monotonically with every release). We don't need the total solution to all our problems. We need to simplify and polish what we have now.