While there are some particularly bad examples of cult of personality in free software, I wouldn't say this is one of them. I think that people are relaying Linus's opinion on desktops so much because he's sharing our thought process and gives us an opportunity to spread our own opinion through his fame, rather than just following everything he says just because of his kernel expertise.

Look at the reaction people had when Gnome 3 was introduced, and Unity in Ubuntu. People didn't wait for Linus to complain against those changes driven by UI designers gone insane.

Lots, and lots of linux users had the SAME reaction Linus had, BEFORE he even publicly talked about it. I went to Gnome 2 from the KDE4 transition since I liked KDE3 but hated KDE4, and went to Xfce after the Gnome 3 and Unity debacle. And I didn't wait for Linus to talk about his thoughts on the linux desktop to switch everytime something bugged me.

Aaron Seigo is asking us to not care about Linus opinion ? But we don't give a crap about yours, man, you're the reason why KDE4 went to hell, the man behind Plasma. After so many years acting like you know better what your users want than they do you're getting all hurt when people listen to someone like Linus instead of you ? the thing about Linus is, he's just a user like the rest of us rather than a desktop developer, but with his fame he can make his opinion reach your ears and it seems you don't quite like what regular users think of your "innovations".