They appeared before in OSes like Oberon, Lillith, predating Linux.

Once again, I'm not talking about who invented them. I'm talking about the innovations in tiling managers in Linux WMs. I somehow doubt you'll find something as good as AwesomeWM in pre-Linux WMs.

My Android phone is also much more beefy than all PC combined I owned between 1992 and 2003.

Most embedded stuff doesn't need that much power.

That is how we end up with Electron.

What is wrong with having options? Even the ESP32 family already have C line for low power applications. No need to project Electron into everything.

Exactly the option is using Raspberry PI instead of ESP32.

I think trying to be everything devalues the original idea.

When compared with GNOME 2.0. Mate and Cinnamon exist for a reason.

'you are used to that other thing' is not equivalent to being better.

Ok, so here are the points where GNOME 3.0 is worse:

- Basic window manager capabilities since twm and fwvm require extensions

- JavaScript all over the place, and for several years, GJS + SpiderMonkey had enough leaks and loss of performance versus the C based extensions

- Windows like registry for gsettings.

- One needs a third party app to actually edit gsettings in a comfortable way

- Multiple reboots on the IDE tooling, the new designer actually uses Web rendering tech for what are supposed to be native applications

- The way virtual monitors are managed versus traditional X Windows managers is bonkers

- No support for Windows shading, again another classical X Windows manager feature

Plenty of others I could list.

Don't need to be so drastic, XFCE, Afterstep, windowmaker, Openbox, Enlightment,...

Every time I have watched Linaro presentations, I mostly got the feeling that their customers so top speak are embedded (Automobile and co) and Android OEMs, not so much people that would like to some day have GNU/Linux on ARM desktops/laptops.

That isn't the problem, rather that our companies also got infected by MBAs with late stage capitalism mindset, and followed all US economic think thanks great ideas to outsource everything.

Yes, but the US ones are still around, mostly.

Only in facade, most real work is done out from far Asia, hence why they got this wonderful president with the empty promises to bring them back home.

N95 was the first Nokia model where OpenGL ES was fully hardware accelerated and not using software rendering, by the way.

It had a quite cool launch demo with Asphalt,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20YMdIswaW8

Remember that this are PS like graphics on a phone.

Nowadays there are plenty of WebGL games that aren't half as good.

Communicator devices with Symbian were pretty clear personal computers.

You could even do regular development on device with Python, Apache based servers, and a few other languages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_for_S60

Many people forget that the Apple of today only exists out of sheer luck, by bringing back in house one of their founders.

Apple of today gets idolatrised to a point that it never us in the 1990's, when they did enough random shit that they almost went bankrupt.

Also, Nokia Alumni over here, from 2005 - 2010.

I really hate that several vendors when moving from PaaS to SaaS, have dropped their Java and .NET SDKs, and now the only thing they have is Next.js integrations.