Seems this will come up every few years again. I remember when I was part of the "Linux Interface Project" in the 90s, which started out as a bunch of fledgling Qt programmers trying to create some missing widgets. This was in the Qt 0.x days, where there was still a lot of "basic" functionality missing. And because of licensing issues and delusions of grandeur about proper OO design (i.e. reading Taligent papers etc.), we decided to do our own stuff.

Others, including some German dude and his "Kool" desktop project were a lot more pragmatic. Still seems the better approach, or otherwise we'd all be using the Hurd.