Right, this is why I compared it to car manufacturers. At a base level, there is little to no reason to prefer one car to another. Bicycles can be the same. That said, at the ends, there are people that latch on heavily to decisions and small differences in the options.

Now, again to your point, we are all on the same roads. Such that standardizing parts is incredibly valuable.

I /think/ the trap is that standards often act as constraints on the manufacturers. And software is a large industry where constraints are easy to effectively ignore during development. Memory requirements. Safety from malicious actors on the system. Capabilities of different computers. I could probably go on.

I suspect it is worse than that sounds, even, as developers tend to focus on the intrinsic quality of code thinking that is paramount. I hate that sentence, as it makes it sound like I don't think the quality of the code matters. I fully think it does. I also fully think we fall for aesthetic quality of code far more than we do any other quality.

> What I am not okay with is myriad of linux window managers which are 99% the same generic window manager.

Not sure if you were there but this was way worse in the 1990's when Linux was still very young. Every person and their dog wrote a window manager (I know I wrote a shitty one) and until GNOME & KDE there was no DE to standardise around at all.

At least we have 3 or 4 fairly fully fledged desktop environments now as well as a 1000 different window managers.

Cosmic is building on top of https://github.com/Smithay/smithay there is convergence happening on de facto wayland protocols compositors support

KDE and Gnome are nowhere near the same thing, they have very different philosophies, guidelines, and underlying UI frameworks.