I think the hard part about the Linux desktop ecosystem and its development pattern is the cobbled-up-parts nature of the system, where different teams and individuals work on different subsystems with no higher leadership directing how all of these parts should be assembled to create a cohesive whole. We have a situation where GUI applications depended on X.org, yet the X.org developers didn't want to work on X.org any more. If the desktop Linux ecosystem were more like FreeBSD in the sense that FreeBSD has control over both the kernel and its bundled userland, there'd be a clearer transition away from X.org since X.org would have been owned by the overall Linux project. However, that's not how development in the Linux ecosystem works, and what we ended up with is a very messy, dragged-out transition from X to Wayland, complete with competing compositors.

Bazaar-style development seems to work for command-line tools, but I don't think it works well for a coherent desktop experience. We've had so much fragmentation, from KDE/Qt vs GNOME/GTK, to now X11 vs Wayland. Even X11 itself didn't come from the bazaar, but rather from MIT, DEC, and IBM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System).

Access to virtually infinite cash had more to do with Android's success than the source being proprietary.

> Perhaps proprietary closed source development is better

Perhaps...

> Open source development should take some lessons if they want to be successful

A lot of people who write the gui stuff for Linux do it because they want to. Success is not necessarily the same metric as a company making a product.

There are companies working within the space and I doubt the licensing really makes much difference to the outcome (i.e. your Google example)

> If development for X is ceasing now, there isn't time to experiment on finding the true successor.

Why? Again, the people working on it because they want to don't need to do anything, they can experiment. Someone can still fix up issues in X. Some companies will fund the development of things that are important to them. You make it sound like the oss community should be acting like one entity to achieve something, but there is no overarching goal nor a reason for there to be one. People will continue pulling in different directions.

> A lot of people who write the gui stuff for Linux do it because they want to.

Think about how many people might want to write for it if it had a compelling ui stack, tho

You think Linux isn't widely used at scale?

Phones are a different market from computers, even though they're technically the same thing. A large segment of people own "phones" but not a computer. Linux runs a large chunk of the internet. I think it's used quite well at scale.

Even in the server market the success of having a stable app platform can be attributed to Linux, the kernel, solely for having a policy to never break userspace. The base of the app platform was already figured out a long time ago, and if you look at the bulk of Linux contributions you will see that they are coming from companies using Linux commercially.

> You think Linux isn't widely used at scale?

Certainly not in a high-productivity environment. Google has to swap out most of the runtime components with distributed alternatives to make it compelling in a corporate (distributed) environment.

Linux (the kernel) is also open source and doesn't suffer from the fragmentation problem. It's pretty much unique to the Linux desktop because there are too many cooks involved.

But even if there's only one cook, it could be worse (if that cook is the gnome team). At least with multiple cooks we can pick kde instead of gnome.