Is it possible for the community to allow a desktop guru? Early on in GNOME they had a number of popular graphics designer types making all sorts of really exotic looking UIs, a number of conflicts ended that. (enlightenment was the official window manager for a while there)
Then the eazel guys showed up and made Nautilus, if anybody could have been the guru, it was Andy. I honestly don't know what appended there. Nautilus is still around, it's under gone some substantial changes along the way.
Seems to me it's a very difficult community problem to solve. Look at replacing sysv init, it's a very technical issue, it doesn't matter to a lot of users, there are some technical goals you can bring up to keep the discussion rooted in fact over opinion and there is tremendous disagreement about it. The community hasn't arrived at any conclusion exactly. Why should something as esoteric as a ui be easier to arrive at consensus on? Everyone has an opinion on ui.
There is another aspect to it, it's distribution fragmentation. How do you set an ip address in Ubuntu? How about Fedora? Do it via UI and command line. They are different and that's an easy one. The mechanics are so different, it's not a desktop problem, it's a distribution problem, which sort of makes KDE and GNOME toolkits rather than desktops themselves.
Well what I mean is, imagine if Ubuntu at some point started to be opinionated about what a Desktop Linux should look like more and more, with some people inside fully responsible to build the UX in every detail, how binary packages should be trivial to download and install, how drivers should be trivial to install (for a subset of the hardware that is fully supported at least), and so forth.
A distribution that tried to provide a full experience, instead of being, indeed, a Software Distribution. In that case you can have people in charge of deciding all the details. Payed people to do the best work possible.
Then the eazel guys showed up and made Nautilus, if anybody could have been the guru, it was Andy. I honestly don't know what appended there. Nautilus is still around, it's under gone some substantial changes along the way.
Seems to me it's a very difficult community problem to solve. Look at replacing sysv init, it's a very technical issue, it doesn't matter to a lot of users, there are some technical goals you can bring up to keep the discussion rooted in fact over opinion and there is tremendous disagreement about it. The community hasn't arrived at any conclusion exactly. Why should something as esoteric as a ui be easier to arrive at consensus on? Everyone has an opinion on ui.
There is another aspect to it, it's distribution fragmentation. How do you set an ip address in Ubuntu? How about Fedora? Do it via UI and command line. They are different and that's an easy one. The mechanics are so different, it's not a desktop problem, it's a distribution problem, which sort of makes KDE and GNOME toolkits rather than desktops themselves.