> unpaid headless chicken with no overarching vision
systemd, GNOME, mesa etc all have developers who are being paid by companies for their work (Red Hat, Microsoft, Canonical, SUSE etc). That said, you're not wrong on the 'no overarching vision' part, see Wayland.
> Linus figure that coordinates the userspace and organises a common platform API
Flatpak with the freedesktop runtimes are just this, that said some companies (e.g. Canonical) are trying to sabotage these efforts and Ubuntu not shipping with Flatpak is the biggest hurdle.
Flatpak is not a common userspace library, just a set of sandboxed functions (i.e. portals).
What we need is something that groups Qt/GTK, pipewire, part of systemd, part of flatpak, part of Wayland into a single library, a bit like Win32 is. And the guarantee that it remains stable even for closed source projects. For example Linux is free to change its internals and requires everything to be open, so drivers can be adapted whenever the APIs change. This is not good enough for a desktop API.
systemd, GNOME, mesa etc all have developers who are being paid by companies for their work (Red Hat, Microsoft, Canonical, SUSE etc). That said, you're not wrong on the 'no overarching vision' part, see Wayland.
> Linus figure that coordinates the userspace and organises a common platform API
Flatpak with the freedesktop runtimes are just this, that said some companies (e.g. Canonical) are trying to sabotage these efforts and Ubuntu not shipping with Flatpak is the biggest hurdle.