Does it seem like Linux Desktop Environments have regressed since the mid-2000s?

For those of us who were users back then (or earlier), there was a window compositor known as Compiz. It provided a lot of functionality that's just plain gone in most environments now, even more than a decade later.

Lots of visual effects, such as the more flashy desktop cube, wobbly windows, window opacity, and hundreds of other effects that actually leveraged 3D acceleration hardware instead of letting it languish unused. While most environments have some amount of compositing, it's usually an extremely stripped-down subset of what Compiz could do 10 years ago.

But here's one that vanished which actually increased my productivity moderately: the widget layer. Press a hotkey and a secondary layer superimposes itself over whatever desktop you're in, holding certain pinned widgets (or apps) you want available everywhere, but out of the way until needed. Maybe stash Slack or Discord in there, or some sticky notes. Why not take the idea further and have a different layer per hotkey? While it's possible to do that with desktops, there's a certain benefit to having the additional layer transposed over the current viewport.

Compiz worked perfectly fine for me in an underpowered Samsung NC10 netbook from 2008, and yet there's no equivalent for 2020 hardware. It may be a stretch to say LDEs have outright regressed since 2008, but they've definitely lost something since then, and it's a shame. I think about Compiz fondly every couple years and spend some time looking around at current environments, but always find them missing something (or a lot of somethings).

Unfortunately after Compiz was abandoned, the code wasn't really picked up and integrated into anything else. Canonical adopted it for a while in Unity, but even that's essentially gone now. KDE, Gnome 3, Mate, Cinnamon, etc., all have a bit of visual flair here and there, including Expose-style scaling or desktop views, but it's all very... sanitized. Few options or configuration, and a very "Windows 10" or OSX feel.

Perhaps that's how we know Linux has finally "matured" and that "this year is finally the year of the Linux Desktop". I could be wrong though; let me know if I am. I want to be wrong, actually.