"Looking ahead, I'd love to see a foundation bring together the Linux desktop community and have them hammer out out a common desktop for everyone."
What about the GNOME or KDE foundations? or do those not count? What about the elementary folks doing an excellent job at designing their OS and ecosystem?
LINUX ISN'T THE FUCKING PLATFORM... Stop treating desktops environments as pluggable modules that you should be able to hotswap without that having an effect in functionality of your machine.