And that’s fine.

I was pointing out that a simpler solution exists. I prefer simple solutions, because I want to test whatever idea I have in real world situation first before I go for a more complete one. Kinda like doodling before committing to do a sketch (or spend weeks doing a painting).

> It's been 30+ years, we deserve a better desktop experience

That desktop experience would need to be like smalltalk (where it’s trivial to modify the gui). The nice power of Unix is having the userland being actually a userland. Meaning you can design a system for your workflow and let the computer take care of that. Current desktop environment doesn’t allows for that kind of flexibility.

Also it’s the nature of unix that makes such basic utilities possible (and building them with raw xlib or tcl is easier than gtk). Imagine doing the same on macOS or Windows where everything is behind an opaque database where some other process fancies itself as its owner.

There's also a pattern based on the simple solution that used to be more common: One command-line program for updating and querying the current state, and a second GUI one that just acts as a dumb interface for the first one. Even aside from separation-of-concerns purity, there are two more practical benefits: this gives you scriptability (say, automatically choosing an environment on startup) as well as easier support for multiple desktop environments (two different dumb GUI frontends for the actual complexity in the command-line backend, or updating the GUI because of a change in the APIs without worrying about breaking the important logic).