There's another item to add to my list of 7 Reasons Why Linux Won't Succeed On The Desktop. An Australian doctor who spent his spare time working on the kernel says desktop performance is suffering because Linus Torvalds and company are only concerned about enterprise users. He got so ticked off he quit Linux in a huff, and made some pointed comments about Linus.
The doctor/developer is named Con Kolivas. His tale is pretty important, especially in the context of all the push-back to my criticisms of desktop Linux. Essentially, Kolivas agrees, but for completely different reasons. His take: "The desktop PC, for which Linux started out as being developed for, [has] fallen by the wayside. . .The developers were all developing for something that wasn't the desktop. They had all been employed by big name manufacturers who couldn't care less about the desktop (and still don't) but want their last 1% on their database benchmark or throughput benchmark or whatever."
http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2007/09/sparks_fly_as_l.html