This inevitably leads to one of two situations:

1. The user happens to love KDE, in which case they see you as an ally anyway.

2. The user happens to love GNOME, in which case they instantly see why choice is a good idea.

Mind you, this “split” is becoming less of an “issue” lately anyway, as both KDE and GNOME are making a concerted effort to do similar things in a similar way (via FreeDesktop specifications), and largely apps on one have no issue working on the other anyway (not that they really ever had any issue, beyond look and feel mismatches.)

I use the same kind of counter for people who complain about there being too many distros: I just say “I know, everyone should just use Gentoo.”

Another thing I see lacking besides a common goal, is a goal in general. Most people will say our common goal is to destroy Microsoft when that isn’t it. Another person might say we just want to be a viable option for the desktop market, which I still feel has a bit to go, but has gotten better in the last 3 to 5 years, actually the past 2 years have been pretty good for the Linux desktop.

Oh, and the volunteers aren’t silly. Because if it wasn’t for all of these volunteers, Linux wouldn’t be anything more than a Kernel that Linus enjoys working on. I am interested in who you feel are the top 5 developers in the world. I have 3 that stick out in my head, however I feel they might be past their prime in some cases.

Also, there are a few things the open source hippies could do to make the life of Microsoft really bad and really really fast (practically you could at least quadruple the migration rate of Linux within couple months from what it is currently). There are a few (~10) strategically juicy targets but no one seems to be working on them. The lack of coordination issue again, people would be working on those if they just had finished some other things first already…

Think about it for a second now. If the GNU project hadn’t created Gnome, we would all more than likely be using KDE today, which I wouldn’t mind But there are people out there that don’t like KDE for various reasons, which at times I understand wholeheartedly. So now, people have their choice of 2 skyscrapers to use and maybe one day help maintain. Maybe this 2nd skyscraper helped make Linux as popular as it is today, well I can guarantee it helped, as there are a lot of Gnome users. I know there were other DEs before these 2, but these are the 2 predominant skyscrapers.

I tend to agree at the same time though because if all of the effort was targeted at one project, maybe then things could be better. I think the skyscraper analogy can work in a lot of circumstances, but I think the society that Linux has created also prevents it at the same time. I think the society realized that everybody has a different need from their system, so offering this choice tends to help everyone in the long run. It is still kind of hard to imagine because it leaves a huge “what if” that would go on forever.

You are 100% correct though that Office 2007 has put OO.o years behind functionality and somewhat with usability. I don’t/haven’t used Office 2007 enough to see the usability side just yet. But from what I have seen, at first there was a decent learning curve of where everything was located. That is what I liked about OO.o is that usability wise it was damn close to spot on with Office in a majority of locational aspects.

I will also be the first to say that if it wasn’t for Microsoft, more than likely, you and I wouldn’t be holding this conversation the way we are. BBS might still be alive, well it is, but not like it was. Microsoft has done so much for the technology world that you can’t really be all that angry at them. Granted their past, and somewhat present, business practices aren’t all that ethical. But at the same time either was Ma Bell’s. Look at AT&T today, they have painted, sold, torn down, and somehow recreated a skyscraper that integrated everything their previous skyscraper(s) did.