I particularly like that RMS quote

You're shooting the messenger. I am nothing more than a symptom of a problem, and probably not even that.

Let's be clear: I have nothing but excellent things to say about the Linux ecosystem as a whole, and I believe fundamentally in open source. I love working with it.

I was mostly quiet during the Gnome 2 days... It wasn't great but it wasn't bad. Regular people could learn it and use it and rely on it. I participated on some mailing lists and helped out in a few places where I could. The future wasn't here, but it seemed like it was on the horizon. I had a number of people in my office using and enjoying Linux.

Then Gnome 3 and KDE 4 arrived. They wasted huge amounts of my time and forced me to switch my team to Macs just to get back to work. Talk about an insult. It still makes me unreasonably angry. Any time I go to a conference and see a sea of 95% glowing Apple symbols, I think back to eight years ago when it was 80% Apple, 15% Linux, and 5% MS. I guess that was the peak.

So, you're wrong about the first thing that's holding the Linux desktop back. No amount of capital can make up for poor and mercurial leadership.

These days, other than Cinnamon (which is too small to make a difference), there's no hope on the horizon. Gnome, KDE, and Ubuntu are all chasing desktops and users that don't currently exist. Apple is cleaning up. And MS appears to be dumping a lot more capital into attracting developers and backpedalling from their everything-like-a-tablet mistake. They're getting interesting again.

Windows 8 was the opportunity. We had the infrastructure and manpower to take advantage of it. And, by shipping terrible design and premature technologies, we blew it.

No, I'm not the problem. But I do care, and I'm trying to describe the problem as best as I can. One day I'd like to be able to bring developers back onto the Linux desktop. One day.