Yeah it was their response to Vista with dwm and other fancy UI things. Yet here we are at the end of 2016 and Wayland still isn't quite there and gnome went some weird direction with everything. I hate how much wasted space there is at the top of the screen for gnome. Cinnamon is really nice albeit a little bloat with options. That isn't really a bad thing though imho.

The original iPhone was released in 2007.

Desktop environments have been desperately trying to look like a phone interface ever since.

And yet, nearly 10 years later, I'm still writing this on a desktop PC with three large monitors and a very typical keyboard and mouse...

I always thought it was somehow related to the video previews of longhorn and all the semantic desktop talk of the time.

I dunno. I think there's been exactly one recent gui revolution, and that was OS X in 2001. After that it was all jellybeans and minimal windows. One could probably argue that OS X didn't create a trend as much as rode the wave of a trend (something Apple is great at) - but either way, that's how I see the origin of both gnome, kde and MS vista.

The problem, which both gnome and kde tried to tackle, is to end up with a consistent vision for all apps. If one looks at BeOS, Amiga OS or maybe even QNX - they all have a more consistent gui experience than probably any Linux gui.

Partly that is because, like windows, every Linux distribution will need to support apps that are made for the "wrong" de - no one project manage to reinvent all applications.

And non-trivial gui applications really need to be reinvented to work well in a new ux paradigm. I'm talking about apps like gimp, blender, krita - and probably all the office packages and smaller apps like abiword.

I'm guessing that the goal has too often landed on a consistent look rather than on a consistent experience - and so one has never taken full-fledged, best-of-breed apps and adapted them to a strong vision, but rather taken a handful of "ok apps" and then written the rest from scratch. Obviously not being able to invest the ~decades of work many apps already have.

It's not all doom and gloom - for example we have chrome and modern safari as sane browsers thanks to this hubris-or-bust mindset (that led to the webkit browser engine).

Mate isn't too bad and there's always i3, stumpwm and/or xmonad