I remember Compiz being cool looking, but resulting in mostly crashing my computer or freezing the GPU driver.

I never had any issues at all with it. I believe it was all tied in with how stable your graphics card driver was. I grew tired of it after a few months and went back to boring old xfce flat, square windows, but it was fun while it lasted and peopel were always impressed by it.

I miss that feeling. Desktop moves at a much slower pace today.

Me too.

Desktop "progress" is now sadly now mostly done by Microsoft (geriatric at best) and Apple (mostly just implementing the new graphical design whims every year).

My god I wish companies would stop iterating on desktop “default” design. The only features on a Mac I use are Cmd+space and Cmd+tab. Beyond that it’s just a host. Every time they add crap I have to find and disable it all.

By all means make cool stuff but also make it opt in.

So much this.

Things I need my OS to do are: run my apps (office/browser/games), connect my devices (printers/game controllers/displays), basic file operations (copy/paste/delete)

And while doing this be: secure, reliable, out of my way.

All these adding people/chat/weather widgets "innovations" (looking at you, msft) make me throw my hand up in the air and ask "why", I wish they would spend that time and energy on security and reliability instead.

Ahh that weather widget was so bad. I had to use Windows for one project, and one day that abomination just appeared there. It rendered very badly (text didn't look at all like other taskbar elements), it was in a wrong language (???) and unnecessarily hard to remove. Felt super unprofessional, something I'd expect from browser malware.

I feel the same about the control panels. Windows 11 has like three or so? I can't keep up, thankfully they added a search function some time back and so, I only have to remember the keywords.

I don't miss desktop progress the way it was done on Linux between 2000 and 2015 (ish). It was exciting but now, I'm happy with what I have with Plasma 5. It is a fast, stable, solid desktop environment.

Plasma 5 is great and ages like good wine. The interface does not change much, but receives big improvements each version that don't break habits. Focus is on fixing usability bugs. See the weekly posts at [1] for instance.

It gets refined instead of changed.

[1] https://pointieststick.com/

That's not right. Gnome Shell overthrow the whole concept of a desktop in the past years, KDE never stopped to invent and there are hundreds of small WMs for every liking with hugely different concepts.

Microsoft and Apple both are stuck comparingly both running the same Windows 95 approach for all their desktops since.