There are so many areas where the various desktop environments should be collaborating, but aren't. KDE, GNOME, Xfce, and Cinnamon all have menu item extensions, yet they are wholly incompatible, forcing every one of them to create their own reinvented wheels. At least the GTK environments should have combined and standardised their efforts here over a decade ago (KDE would be harder to integrate here because they use Qt).
Users should come first. This is such a no-brainer.
A developer should be able to create a menu item extension, say a weather forecast, and have it work on GNOME, Xfce, and Cinnamon. It's bonkers that it has to be individually redeveloped for every environment.
@thomholwerda Gnome Shell 3+ extensions are JavaScript, Xfce is still using GTK for them (also for its Panel etc). Cinnamon is practically dead. The differences in style and desktop integration between Gnome and Plasma makes cross-platform plasmoids/shell extensions impossible, even when you ignore the differences between the Gnome JS tongue and Plasma’s QML.
So the number and quality of extensions will continue to be very limited for all of them.
At least, until somebody does for cross desktop extensions the same others did for cross-environment applications: find a way to wrap up a kind of browser extension as a very wasteful cross desktop extension. Are we ready for +100MB desktop extensions?
