Green Hat

Probably, because of the background image.

Hopefully, never.

Distros are unnecessary entities and don’t improve anything here. What is needed it’s separation of the system and the apps, where apps are provided in sandboxed bundles with permissions. It will solve a lot of issues, not only one you have mentioned. And try to imagine amount of years needed for understanding or explaining importance of this to the GNU/Linux community. A viable desktop OS, huh?

Society will suffer anyway. It doesn’t make solutions magically appear. You only said why you want it, but not how to do it. To transform GNU/Linux distros into a viable desktop OS is not an easy task, especially when people don’t have a consensus about what it should be.

“Desktop” Linux exists in this state for decades. Who cares? Maybe we won’t have consumer desktops as a niche soon. Existing users are fine with that. Don’t say you are waiting that Linux will become “a viable desktop OS alternative” in next few years.

It’s also not about “desktop and sever variants”. Desktop Linux is either conservative or underresourced. Conservatives will told you that you are wrong and there is no issue. And they are major Linux zealots. For the other side someone need to write code and do system design, and there are not many of people for that. So, it’s better not to expect a solution anytime soon, if you are not planning to work on it by yourself.

Linux defaults are optimized for performance and not for desktop usability.

IMO it is a combination of two bad ideas.

Disto packages had issues with unofficial repos like forever.

Tor.

ChromeOS doesn’t get much attention and resources from Google currently. No major things has happened since Crostini, and the planned separation of the browser from the system hasn’t happened yet. So I don’t expect to see results of these news anytime soon. It’s a matter of a decade.