Chris's Wiki :: blog/unix/UnixDesktopFutures
Once upon a time, the future of Unix desktops looked fairly straightforward. Everyone ran on X, so the major threat to cross-Unix portability in major desktops was the use of Linux only APIs, which became especially D-Bus and systemd related things. Unix desktops that were less attached to tight integration with the Linux environment would probably stay easily available on FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and so on.
What happened to this nice simple vision was Wayland becoming the future of (Linux) graphics. Linux is the primary target of KDE and especially Gnome, so Wayland being the future on Linux has gotten developers for Gnome to start moving toward a Wayland-only vision. Wayland is unapologetically not cross-platform the way X was, which leaves other Unixes with a problem and creates a number of possible future for Unix desktops.
In one future, other Unixes imitate Linux, implementing enough APIs to run Wayland and the other Linux things that in practice it depends on, and as a result they can probably continue to provide the big Linux-focused desktop environments like Gnome. I believe that FreeBSD is working on this approach, although I don't know if Gnome on Wayland on FreeBSD works yet. This allows the other Unix to mostly look like Linux, desktop-wise. As an additional benefit, it allows the other Unix to also use other, more minimal Wayland compositors (ie, window managers) that people may like, such as Sway (the one everyone mentions).
