Looking at opensource desktop - part 1

I've been involved with Linux since around the 2.0.2x series kernels in around November 1996. Admittedly I was of pure hacker-mentality had no real idea of what it would take to run a business that depended on the desktop to perform it's duties, such as printing, saving, loading/retrieving, web-browsing, network file system connectivity. I was just happy to be able todo interesting stuff with my TCP stack and write my own software without having to fork-out big dollars for the experience.

As I grew up with Linux I started out on the KDE desktop, which was good but a little incomplete, but it was very stable, and highly consistant. Eventually, Gnome took my interest, it seemed to have more bell's and whistles and fun little features and quirks, albeit at the cost of many simple user-interface design rules.
To my amusement, a number of sites have begun to point out these issues, actually the site mentioned there has some pretty good reasoning behind a lot of the critical issue's with Gnome it exposes - Extremely poor user interface, inconstant user experience etc.

..Fast forward 10 years...

I'm working as a self-employed contractor developing web-solutions, mainly with the Drupal. Slowly and steadily I'm starting to really understand the importance of software support (often I am just this guy), external commercial support (where I go to get something solved for a client) and efficiently completing tasks (more-coal-per-man-hour).

What I am realising, is that Gnome simply fails at all of these tasks, it fails endemically. Check out the age of the some of these bugs todo with pretty critical things like printing, integration, browsing, etc. Some of these are over 6 years old!

It fails to provide support.

It fails to move forwards in a manner that focuses on providing improvements and resolution to existing issues - it actually seems to focus on providing more bells and whistles - which will - introduce more problems into the loop.

But let's take a look at a higher level.

If i was managing a large business with a lot of desktops running this software, what would i look for?

Gnome does not mention anything about it's infrastructure that KDE does.

No mention of commercial support, no mention that they are at exhibitions promoting their product, no roadmap, no enterprise reports, no usability reports.

What is interesting is that neither parties got any money in the google summer-of-code to purely address old-crusty-bugs.

Exactly where is the Open Source desktop going?

In part two of this article, I'll add the email responses for request ofr commercial support for a couple of important Desktop Applications on both platforms, gnucash and koffice - from such companies as Gnome, KDE, Ubuntu, Open-Sense and CyberSource.