[halo]

Rather than creating a large reply, I'd rather put it down to what is the single biggest problem is that, in my eyes, trumps every single thing in his essay: Ugly widgets, icons, fonts and badly thought out standardised user interfaces in both the KDE and, to a lesser extent, GNOME projects.

I think it's obvious why - every application inherits from them and their bad design decisions result in most applications having the same usability problems.

NB: The author apparently thinks that making me scroll a hell of a lot is good for usability - instead I ended up turning off CSS.