Sounds like a gimmick that will be annoying after a week. Users who aren’t KDE developers don’t want a desktop to love them back, in fact they don’t care or want to think about their desktop beyond launching their apps and window management.

What a weird opening.

Also, both projects were started late 1996. A lot of people were already running KDE alphas/betas before the 1.0 release, because as a desktop it was vastly better than any of the window managers at the time.

I remember installing beta 1 in 1997 was a big relief for me. It felt like the last barrier was broken for Linux taking over the desktop, now that it finally had a desktop that could compete with Windows 95. Of course, I was terribly naive, but I blame it on only being 15yo.

I don't recall Xfce being used much at all. It become more popular until 5-10 years later because people were complaining that KDE/GNOME became too heavy and they were looking for more lightweight alternatives.

If you want to introduce AI to a desktop, the best way is to add an interface for automating that desktop and add a separate AI agent that can use that interface. This also benefits accessibility tools that can use the same automation interface.

Sadly still a lot of things did not work correctly out of the box, and everything was kinda fixable, but would have needed some bigger time investment from my side.

Instead just telling llm cli that something does not work correctly, and waiting a few minutes until it fixes it is just so much better for me.

Do I want LLMs all over the place in my desktop? Probably not. But having an LLM fixing all kind of broken or miss-configured software is just so convenient.