To be honest, it's a little bit embarassing to see such a... well, how would you call it? Flamewar, maybe.

I've been active in a irrelevant project of GNOME (ie. marketing), and my initial opininon still seems to hold: It's not about the desktop; it's about the apps. Neither GNOME's Shell nor Canonical's Unity solves any interesting problems for users.

And the lack of apps is basically just a matter of a missing business models for Open Source Desktop Applications.

To see them fighting over stuff that probably makes up -- at most -- 0.01 percent of the users' time, let's me wonder whether Open Source is ever going to be any major force on the desktop. I've once believed it would, but this belief dwindles.