Where is all crazy linux desktop ideas and experiments?

I am just a bit curious, who is doing much experimentation these days?
Back in the day there were some neat stuff in compiz, and it is still there, but all those wobbly windows and 3d cubes are pretty old. And we got virtual desktops even in windows now. What is next?

Who is thinking about new ideas in desktop user experience, all of the good stuff is already copied by windows and osx, what is next? Who is doing innovations now? Back in 2005 you can show compiz 3d stuff to your friends and they will drop jaws, but where is all new crazy, not even useful but cool looking experiments now? Who is working on it, anyone got some links maybe?

Everyone is currently working on shipping Wayland.

People have been working on shipping Wayland since forever.

Some say wayland is actually xOrg 3.

;)

Or mir. Might aswell ship mir.
Oh wait mir isnt shipping either.

And you have gnome 3 which was a big shift , the Ubuntu convergence, the elementary OS route, wayland and Mir trying to replace Xorg, nemo for the file management and so on...Things are pretty active in that respect.

More so than the cudes and wobbly windows that are more a gimmick than a feature imo. Impressive to show to friends maybe but not that important in actual user experience.

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It must just be my taste but I quite like the more corporate polished desktop designs. For instance what Rainmeter in the first place did for Windows I really liked but how rainmeter actually worked not so much.

I have on my HP workstation a dual boot with Windows 10 Pro on a Samsung 850 Pro SSD and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on a Intel SSD and on this Ubuntu install I just run Conky and tweaked the theme a bit. Dare I say I even somtimes long for the 90's desktops of Unix and Windows NT desktops. Well that is just my opinion.

I think you can still tweak linux desktop environments quite substantially. Especially in environments like gnome, cinnamon, KDE Palsma and mate. Deepin has a pretty interesting taste as well. I am sure you can tweak cinnamon, plasma or mate enough to get that 90s feeling.

That is basically what Linux desktop brings to the table. Instead of accepting the way the designer made the desktop you can tweak it to your tastes as much as you want. Whether you want sth traditional or sth very extravagant.

As far pushing the boundarys goes, gnome 3 and KDE plasma have my vote.

I am not thinking about 90s feeling.
Awesome 3d-ish window switching impressed MS so much they tried to do it in windows vista XD.
Virtual desktops were in linux since the beginning. now even windows got it out of the box, and OSX had it for some time.
Expose is OSX feature, but i remember using it in ubuntu 6.
Snapping windows to corners, ease of side by side was in linux for some time, and now in windows 10 you can not only do side by side, but snap windows to each screen corner with ease.

All 3d rotating cubes, and zoom out to see all virtual desktops is fun and maybe not really usefull but it is exploration of ideas.
And i am talking about ideas, Some people mentioned mir\wayland but its not ideas, this means nothing to end user,

There is quite a few videos on people trying VR for windows manipulation, and some concepts in form of presentation - https://vimeo.com/6712657

Noticing tiling window managers was quite a discovery for me, i watched "notion" window manager, and i currently using i3wm configured almost as "notion". And even though it is pretty old concept (windows 1.0 had tiling) i see it reappear in new UI, mainly on tablets and phones.

I got a lot of love for Gnome 3, and stuff KDE is doing, but it all seems like minor improvements over old stuff, and not something crazy like switching windows in 3d that Windows Vista tried to steal XD,

There should be something crazy impractical awesomeness out there,
I thought i am missing something and there is some desktop environments or window manipulation programs trying new concepts or something.

Yes. You are sort of missing a fundamental concept.

We can not do anything new and crazy, when the old stuff does not work as well as it can/should.

We have to make what we already have work so well that it wont hold future development back.

My opinion is based on personal experience with Plasma is that I like the color scheme but very much find the buttons and the 'windows' very childlike not appealing to me. There are reasons to like a Windows desktop somtimes better in that aspect. Or why do like Android

so much so, the Linux Mint team is going to design Xapps...