Greetings,
I was looking at the bleeding and cutting edge direction that the KDE desktop environment was heading with its plasma, workspaces and QT5 concepts. It seems fairly touch-screen oriented which itself seems to be the wave of the future. I also noticed that Gnome 3 was heading in a similar direction. My question is why is just KDE and Gnome doing this?... what will become of all the other minor or less mainstream desktop environments such as XFCE, LXDE, MATE, Cinnamon, Openbox, and others that are not geared toward touch screen and their developers who seem to have no interest in keeping pace with the wave of the future but rather content with making minor, incremental refinements to GUI's of the past? I'm also surprised that Cannonical Corporation Inc., with it's bottomless pockets, is not trying to steer the Unity desktop of Ubuntu in that direction either... at least it doesn't seem to be doing so at this point anyway...

Thanks

Other GE developers are not really interested in mobile devices, it seems. Using touchscreens in desktop computers or laptops is counter-productive anyway and I can only imagine those who work on 2D graphic and drawings making use of it.

Touch screen is mostly meant for Kiosk-style devices and mobile/embedded devices, it is not really suitable for desktop or even laptop computers (try to work 8 hours on a computer that you have to control using the a touch-capable monitor with getting serious problems with your arms hurting). For that reason touchscreens are not really "the wave of the future" and only DEs/WMs that are interested in being used on mobile/devices are working on being more suitable for touchscreens. For example, the Enlightenment window manager, which is support by Samsung for use on their Tizen IVI systems, but of course also the big ones (KDE/Gnome/Unity).
Regarding Unity, it currently gets a major overhaul (including underlying display server) to be used on mobile devices, for example running the Ubuntu Phone OS.

I think you must be using a different Unity to the one I have seen if you don't think it's aimed at touch-screen devices. The screen-covering menu, huge icons and the like all scream "touch screen" to me.
As has been said above, the reason not every desktop environment is being targeted towards touch screens is that touch screens on desktops are impractical. This has been known for years and there's even a term for it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchs...Gorilla_arm.22
I don't even want to think about how frustrating and painful doing my job using touch screens would be.

I don't know if I'd assume that touch screens are the "future" they seem awful faddish to me.

So I guess Microsoft Windows 9 will go back to being a traditional desktop environment. And touch screens will go onto the trash pile of history.

Windows 8.1 is already less touch-oriented than windows 8. of course touch is here to stay but for desktops it is bound to fail or make us all disabled.