[bryanlarsen]

Which is one reason why the 6 month model that the Linux community has adopted is so great. Every 6 months Unity or Gnome3 or KDE4 incorporate some improvements, but the differences are not major and are easy to learn or ignore. But over time these differences accumulate and become significant real improvements. We get to have our cake and eat it too.

And hopefully these environments have learned their lessons now and haven't incurred the large technical and design debt that necessitate large breaking changes. KDE is up to 4.8 now but nobody is talking about a massive rewrite for KDE5 -- it's just another incremental update. OS X appears to be moving towards this sort of model too, with fairly regular yearly updates. Windows is the only one bucking this trend with its major upcoming breaking change in "Metro". And they're getting pummelled for it.