[ Thanks to James
Maguire for this link. ]
“Because of the announcement and the subsequent
discussion, I immediately had to reconsider my original conclusion:
Does KDE have the evolutionary advantage after all? Or could GNOME
regain it and continue to surpass KDE?“At this stage, definitive answers are impossible. While GNOME’s
plans have received widespread publicity, they are still in the
earliest stages. Few milestones have been set, apart from having
GNOME 3 released a year from now, and the plans are essentially
wish lists that have not been officially approved.“However, assuming that the plans go ahead in something like
their present form, one thing seems clear: Whether GNOME competes
successfully in the long term depends on usability issues.“Specifically, GNOME’s success depends mainly on whether users
will accept the vision of usability contained in GNOME 3.0. This
vision depends partly on GNOME’s final road map, and partly on the
influence of Ubuntu’s Mark Shuttleworth’s campaign to make the
desktop the rival of Apple, which should be in place about the same
time that GNOME 3 appears”