I guess that the article did annoy me. Partly because I remember GNUStep, Longhorn, OLPC etc. etc. which attempted some of these things, and we already know why those projects failed completely, and partly because I can now see the desktop slowly improving month-by-month on the Linux+GNOME stack. Yes, it's painfully slow and gradual, but it's sustainable progress: Wayland compositors, GNOME, Flatpak, and Atomic Workstation are actual shipping code that will only get better and more heavily used over time.