Touch displays? Should be irrelevant in desktop mode. High DPI screens that demand dense rectangular items? The tradeoff seems to be big to be just that.
"most major desktop OSes" is an interesting phrase because there aren't that many. macOS obviously pioneered the "dock", and Windows eventually copied it, because that's what Microsoft does. The only other "major" desktop operating systems are the various distributions of Linux. BSD-based operating systems are in no way "major".
If you don't like the dock, you would probably like KDE Plasma.
This MacOS dock has been around for a long time. It was actually copied from NextSTEP, which was cloned in WindowMaker, which was one of the most popular window managers for unix in the early 2000s.
But even then, the most "mainstream" window managers were copying Windows, which was the most popular OS of the day. Free Software developers would aspire to create something mainstream, and would look to copy whatever was mainstream. Back then it was windows. Today it's MacOS.
Discord -- Title irrelevant
Kontact -- Title irrelevant
Firefox -- Title irrelevant, there's a million tabs
VS Code -- Title irrelevant, mostly.
Remmina -- Title relevant for once, multiple of those.
Terminals -- Title rarely relevant, I just tend to have one per display.
A lot of normal usage moved online, which means it's one of the hundred tabs people end up with. For a lot of people, working with documents is rare, and working with multiple in separate windows is very rare. Things that deal with many files like IDEs do so internally.
Wider and wider monitors that are higher and higher resolution, so the bottom left gets farther and smaller from the eyes. Nevermind multi-monitor setups.
>Being a fan of the "classic" labeled taskbar, taskbar items with text could provide a lot more info
Text requires translation/localization, which is extra work, which is extra cost. Pick a generic, ideally universal icon and it's once-and-done. Also, not everyone can or will read.
>the elongated click area is larger and more predictable.
While I agree, ultimately most people are going to find working with a mouse to be complicated and arduous because it's simply not a "natural, human" action.
>presenting just icons means there has to be a second level grouping if the same app has multiple windows.
You can have multiple buttons with the same icon, you know. A good example of this being the taskbar from Windows 10 and prior with window groupings disabled.
>Touch displays? Should be irrelevant in desktop mode.
The unfortunate reality is the desktop form factor has become a second-class citizen, best we (as in us nerds and graybeards and wizards) get used to it because that reality doesn't care for our chagrin.
>High DPI screens that demand dense rectangular items? The tradeoff seems to be big to be just that.
If anything, higher resolution screens demand circular things because they obviously look smoother than on lower resolution screens.
There was also the CDE (Common Desktop Environment) and its precursor VUE, which was found on HPUX, dating to 1988, originally by Apollo Computer and Domain/OS
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_User_Environment>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Desktop_Environment>
I've personally largely found fat menubars, particularly at the top or bottom of landscape displays, to be annoying, and initially used twm, mwm, and fvwm without the dock. I eventually adopted WindowMaker, though with a vertically-aligned dock. I tend to invoke tools either from window menus or a terminal shell.
As to why the dock is so widely adopted:
Having a standard dock helps with support as there's a standard utility and support scripts can walk through clicking on specific items.
UI/UX follow conventions. Apple's OSX is a widely-used (though not the majority) desktop, and its usability is generally highly regarded. I strongly suspect a mix of trend-following and familiarity drives other desktops' favouring this interface.
GNOME and KDE likely document their rationales somewhere. I'm not aware of where, though if someone familiar with those projects does know, I'd appreciate the pointers.
Where do users expect the menu to be? Wherever devs usually put it.
Where do devs usually put the menu? Where the users previously expected it to be, which is wherever devs put it before then, and so on…
There’s an informal way to solve this infinite regression. It’s a focal point - also called a Schelling point for Thomas Schelling, who proposed this idea in his analysis of cooperation without communication. The usual explanation is something like so:
“Imagine you airdrop two people into unfamiliar terrain. Their goal is to find each other. They have no radios or methods of communication. All they have is a map, and the knowledge that the other person has a copy of the same map. The map has several river crossings, a handful of houses, multiple trails, etc. The topographical layer indicates one large hill near the middle. Both subjects will identify the top of that hill as the ‘correct’ meeting place and head there, even though it has some inefficient drawbacks as a meeting place, such as requiring you to walk uphill.”
Developers and users also have to coordinate without (much) communication, so there are similar pressures on user interfaces, except with the added complication that the shared map now includes history and tradition.
Once you learn this concept you will see it everywhere in user interface design. The cog icon, the floppy disk icon, even the vilified hamburger menu icon are all focal points. Login/password entry is done in the center of the screen. Collapsible sidebar menus are on the left.
There were initial reasons for why these things were picked in the first place, but that merely “put them on the map”, so to speak. The reason for the convergence is that once these things were on the map, they naturally revealed themselves to be focal points over time.
A lot of people are saying that the Dock is copied for the purpose of aesthetics, which may be true, but the aesthetic benefit of making the menubar global is arguably greater and comes with less of a functional tradeoff — it reduces the visual redundancy of duplicate window-attached menubars and gets you that clean look that GNOME and a lot of desktop apps are chasing these days, but without replacing proper menus with a messy "junk drawer" hamburger menu.
The Dock is fine, but I can take it or leave it. It's not really good enough to have strong feelings about. Not a huge fan of Win9X style taskbars either though, they get cluttered and unpleasant to scan very easily.
It makes no sense to me to not have a taskbar fill the entire span of space it has available, or at least allow it to do so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Desktop_Environment
but my guess it os MAC envy :)
That's a misinformed take, Gnome is not the only desktop environment available on Debian, it just happen to be listed first in the installer, it's a DE agnostic OS
If you look at the most popular linux distro, the 3 most popular ones (according to distrowatch) uses XFCE as their default DE https://distrowatch.com/, wich provide a traditional labeled task bar by default
https://wiki.debian.org/DesktopEnvironment
And if you look at what people use in the wild, you'll notice that they move away from the setup you describe: https://old.reddit.com/r/unixporn/