Насчет KDE
https://plus.google.com/+MarkShuttleworthCanonical
Mark Shuttleworth:+Daniel McGuire from a purely technical perspective, yes, your view is pragmatic. Simplistically, Unity used Qt and KDE used Qt and Unity had great UX so surely we could have turned KDE into Unity. However, you are forgetting the sense of personal ownership and leadership that is part and parcel of free software.
The people who work on any free software shell other than GNOME, which is heavily funded by Red Hat (to their credit) are investing their heart and soul and spare time, and quite a lot of upside earning potential, into their own vision of personal computing. It belongs to them, and they would naturally resist someone showing up and saying I have a better vision'.
I did, personally, attempt to get the convergence movement going in both GNOME and KDE. In both cases, the ideas were resoundingly rejected. We hired designers initially, but the feedback from GNOME (well, Red Hat really ;)) was "who do you think you are to show up and tell us what GNOME should look like when you are not bringing code". And that's fair enough really, it's their desktop. Although I would say, code got rejected pretty aggressively too ;)
In the KDE case, it was more about the personality of the leader at the time, who I think felt threatened and insecure.
So at the end I decided, if I wanted that vision to have a chance, the only way was to hire engineers and start work on it. Skin in the game etc.
