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I has to do with out of the box usability, which the majority of people like, vs menus and submenus of submenus full of obscure options that a minority who prefer to tweak the hell out of their desktops like.

It has to do with a decision Red Hat made YEARS ago, which no one except the people who were working there at the time can truly answer. For whatever reason, (and you could certainly be right) Red Hat became the market leader and organizations like Novell felt it was better to support a single desktop instead of forcing 3rd party developers to work with multiple ones.

But since you mention it, Gnome does do better at sticking to a schedule than KDE these days. It didn't used to be that way. Gnome has gotten better and KDE has gotten worse, in that respect.

I agree. I think that is a very minor point, all things considered, but you are correct.

Let me ask you this. If Gnome were on 90% of free desktops and its users were very happy... and kde were on 10% of Free Desktops and its users were very happy, what would you think of that?

I would be slightly disappointed, but mostly very happy. Wouldn't everyone? Are you seriously saying that if the situation was reversed, you wouldn't be? You'd rather have people sad but using GNOME than happy and using KDE? I hope not, but what exactly was the point you're trying to get at here?

I ask because I believe that most computer users want *simple*.

I agree, although where I think we disagree is that I think people actually want their software to do the things they want as well. Simple is better than complex any day, but if it just doesn't work correctly then people will switch to something that does whether it's complex or not.

The current Free Desktop user base is not representative of the average computer user.

I agree again. However, it's pretty obvious that over the years both desktop environments have gotten much more user friendly - you hardly ever have to drop down to the command line anymore. This is going to continue to happen as the user base expands and demands it, and KDE4 is really making a major push in this direction. At least supposedly, I'll reserve my judgment until it actually comes out.

My guess? KDE will become a sort of niche refuge for the power user "elite".

No offense, but KDE and GNOME are both currently in that camp. The only OS that isn't is Windows XP, which I have to say resembles KDE more closely than GNOME. That can be taken as a positive or a negative, but making wild guesses about what may or may not happen at some undisclosed point in the future isn't much more than flamebait.

Edited 2007-10-17 06:21