I even say that instability of the Linux desktop was a considerable contributor to the decline of Linux powered workstations.

People were getting used to the old reliable Gnome2 and the Windows-esque KDE desktop.

But there's always some team of developers thinking they are Apple and completely throw years of progress out the window by breaking compatibility because of some usability "feature" their own selfish conception of usability thinks is a good decision. Some of then even go to the point of rejecting Merge requests to their supposed open source software because of that kind of Whim

But why does the world always go along with it? In an alternate universe, the community just said "yeah, no thanks, I'll keep using Gnome 2", which they continued maintaining under the name Elf or whatever.

They did! MATE is fairly popular, but as to why it happens I think it's about people.

There are only so many people willing (and able) to do the often difficult and unglamorous programming work that goes into maintaining something like Gnome.

If you're working on a major distro you have a certain level of trust in Gnome 3 because the same people delivered and supported Gnome 2. I'm sure when Gnome 3's direction became clear dozens or hundreds said "no way! I'm going to start my own fork which will never change!"

But how do you know which one to pick?

The sad part is that Gnome 2 had a whole ecosystem of third party software that integrated with it. Just a few of that got ported over to Mate (usually just s/GNOME/MATE/g) but it never gained the same traction.

Why did it need to be ported at all? Shouldn't it "just work"?

Mate had to change all “Gnome” strings to “Mate” so both could be packaged/installed in parallel and probably also for legal reasons.

This means all DBus interfaces need to use the new name, a nautilus plugin must now call caja functions instead and so on.

...huh, well that's frustrating! Could this be solved with a basic compatibility layer?

or decompile, touch strings, then recompile.

Mate gives me a warm feeling of being at home where all is totally understandable and nothing has changed since 10+ years ago when Gnome 2 was a king.

I think that's where the fracturing comes in. For whatever reason, distros will ship with the new thing. The past 2 or 3 places I've worked adopted MATE (a continuation of GNOME 2). And, of course, there was instability at these places in figuring out which direction to go.

> For whatever reason, distros will ship with the new thing.

Chicken and egg problem: Popular distros will follow popular DE's, because they have the most people making their way out of bugs and problems.

MATE, on the other hand, is kinda barren compared to more popular options. Even if it's the same old Gnome2 desktop of yore

> The past 2 or 3 places I've worked adopted MATE (a continuation of GNOME 2).

Oh, so it did happen, I’m not currently a Linux user and had no idea!

For many years I was using gnome shell. Every update meant broken extentions. The system would also crash occasionally after few days on a multi-head setup. Then I switched to a hybrid of Sway and KDE and have been never so happy.

Yeah. Used to be a very happy KDE user too. Now I use i3, it's changed the way I use computers forever.

I wouldn't say "instability" as much as lack of focus

Especially as with some evolution it seems it's always a mix of people complaining new change means some X program made in the 70s will break and people who wants to redo something made in the last 6mo because it is "old" already and meet the newfangled thing which is 50% breaking changes 50% barely new things

I would say instability. Linux kernel will straight up revert improvements if it turns out they broke user space. Meanwhile in user space even glibc has broken binary compatibility before, GNOME breaks compatibility with user extensions...