It's more that Desktop development just fizzled out. These days if you are targeting fortune 500 companies with custom applications, you'd have to support multiple platforms in any case and the web makes that a no brainer. Add mobile to the mix and it's game over for desktop app developers.
I'm sure there are still people doing it but it's becoming quite rare that that does not involve electron or similar with a lot of web technology. I haven't come across any projects involving desktop UIs in recent years. Plenty of native IOS/Android + web. But absolutely nothing that had desktop UI on a roadmap or backlog or even on a nice to have list.
Java used to own that space when it still existed. IMHO that went away between 2005-2010 time frame. Before that you could get away with not supporting OSX (or Linux, ever the afterthought) and building stuff with Visual Basic, Delphi or whatever.
I wouldn't really count either as "Desktop". It's basically mobile development for phones and tablets, which I wasn't excluding. ChromeOS is nice but mostly about running web stuff plus whatever kind of works from the Android or Linux ecosystem. I don't think there are a lot of people targeting that specifically.
Enterprise applications are almost exclusively web based. And consumer software that isn't games is mostly web based in electron or one of a few remaining big desktop products (e.g. MS Office or Adobe tools) and also a long tail of relatively niche stuff.
Last time I used a box or tower based desktop was in 2005, since then I only worked in offices where "desktops" are laptops, or more recently 2-1 hybrids, which most people use just like the desktops of yore plugged into docking stations.
I'm sure there are still people doing it but it's becoming quite rare that that does not involve electron or similar with a lot of web technology. I haven't come across any projects involving desktop UIs in recent years. Plenty of native IOS/Android + web. But absolutely nothing that had desktop UI on a roadmap or backlog or even on a nice to have list.
Java used to own that space when it still existed. IMHO that went away between 2005-2010 time frame. Before that you could get away with not supporting OSX (or Linux, ever the afterthought) and building stuff with Visual Basic, Delphi or whatever.