[jrm4]

Sooo, I think this is an overly simplistic view, and this is probably the conversation we should all be having, what's driving a LOT of this isn't "what developers choose to spend their time on as something like a hobby." And perhaps it's not the developers who we should be talking about anyway, I'll grant that.

There are "moneyed" business interests who have a lot at stake at their team winning mindshare and profits. Now, I have no problem with businesses being businesses generally. But part of their "product" is these interfaces. And so again, what I would suggest is that pushing GNOME type interfaces is, long term, a bad strategy that is likely to continue the trend of "Linux" being a second class citizen, by wasting energy toward the impossible goal of beating MacOS at their own game.

Conversely, pushing more configurable and slightly more techy KDE-like interfaces I think has stronger likelihood of making "on the tech margin" people more excited and interested in Linux, and ends up helping more people overall.

Now, I could be wrong about this -- but, while I definitely agree with "no one should to demand what open source developers do, especially if they're not being compensated" -- it's equally as bad (if not worse) to suggest "let's not offer big-picture criticism of trends in open source software that affects a lot of people."