Yes, I think the OS vendors are asleep at the wheel, or they're drunk/high on the moolah to be made by putting the user out there in the data-harvesting markets.

If we had still real OS vendors, there wouldn't be Dropbox or Facebook - these services would've just been folded in as user-controllable, user-centric services that the local OS manages .. I think the general public have been betrayed by those who should have been building better user-controlled operating systems, rather than exposing it all ..

Remember the original Dropbox post [1]? "You can do it with rsync!". The general public seem to want this. Companies just seem to do what people want. I guess those things are ease of use, zero friction, and minimum learning curve. To do all that in Linux for example, you have to invest in learning, which might not be what people want.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

People want that because all they know is the positive aspects that are advertised to them, not the negative aspects that are kept hidden and downplayed.

> FWIW i think desktop peaked around Windows 2000 and on Linux around GNOME 2 and KDE 3.5

IMO the peak of KDE was version 2.2... 3.0 was already a step backwards, although it did become quite good again by the time it reached 3.5. Then with 4.0 everything was reset once more (how many times can you break the ecosystem until application developers and users have had enough of it?)

TBH i never used 2.x, after KDE1.x i mainly used Window Maker (and still use that when on Linux) with the exception of a couple of years when i used Ubuntu as my main OS back when it had GNOME 2. I used KDE 3.x (not sure if 3.5 or earlier though) as a secondary system via a tiny Knoppix CD.