It seems to me, though, that there's room for all the people interested in developing a "for everyone" UI to rally around a single project.
The people interested in making Unity/Gnome 3/etc aren't the people interested in making ratpoison.
I wish desktop Linux would look a lot more like Rails 3: a "sensible defaults" stack that is ready-made for picking up and using, but with the ability to easily swap out SuperFriendlyDesktop for MyBadassTilingWM, the same way I might swap out ActiveRecord for DataMapper.
Of course, every distro thinks they're that, or are trying to be that. The problem is that there's no agreement on those defaults, partly because none of them are good enough (partly because they're no agreement, and around and around we go...)
The problem we're seeing with fragmentation isn't choice per se, but rather what we're seeing proven over and over again is that everyone trying to create their own "friendly" desktops results in none of the projects getting enough traction to get over the hump.
10.04 was that. That's part of the problem, many of the decisions since then seem to have been going backwards rather than building on it as a solid base.
The people interested in making Unity/Gnome 3/etc aren't the people interested in making ratpoison.
I wish desktop Linux would look a lot more like Rails 3: a "sensible defaults" stack that is ready-made for picking up and using, but with the ability to easily swap out SuperFriendlyDesktop for MyBadassTilingWM, the same way I might swap out ActiveRecord for DataMapper.
Of course, every distro thinks they're that, or are trying to be that. The problem is that there's no agreement on those defaults, partly because none of them are good enough (partly because they're no agreement, and around and around we go...)
The problem we're seeing with fragmentation isn't choice per se, but rather what we're seeing proven over and over again is that everyone trying to create their own "friendly" desktops results in none of the projects getting enough traction to get over the hump.