I was at a local LUG meeting today and was very distressed that the above view should be expressed, and forcefully. I found it distressing because that is quite some allegation - that we and Mate users and Cinnamon users etc., (all splinter groups) are actually damaging Linux, doing it harm.
The fact that we are free to digress and disagree is why I like open source so much. Take away that freedom and we might as well all use Windows. It seemed to me a quite extraordinary allegation. And as I say, I found it personally upsetting.
Since Linux without its freedom would not be Linux, nothing would seem to me more terminally harmful to Linux than to destroy that freedom.
I am a congenital maverick. I claim the right to remain a maverick and to swim against the tide as much as I like!
Lisi
My take on this is that we are observing the first major split between producers and consumers in the computing market. Prior to the iPhone and similar devices, both consumers and producers had to use the same hardware and software for their disparate tasks. Now that hardware has become smaller and software more powerful, consumers can for the first time use a "computer" that functions more or less like a video game--i.e. it is "easy to use", "pretty", "simple", it "connects people together", etc. Producers on the other hand will continue to demand more and more power to fuel their increasingly complex tasks and meet their wall clock deadlines.
I have had comments from people who "got used to" KDE4 and Unity, and when they tried TDE again years later, they found that they were vastly more productive in a tasks accomplished vs. hours spent metric.
Consumers will always outnumber producers, therefore they will always have the largest vote. Producers on the other hand know what they need and will pay lots of $$$ to get it, even as the software they require becomes more and more of a niche item. TDE is one of the few projects that can continue to satisfy those needs, and in reality it will have very little impact on the consumer market for Linux.
Just my $0.02. :-)
Tim
One further thought: What if all Linux users were forced to use a GUI exclusively, simply because the GUI is "newer" and a "step forward" compared to the command line? Users could adapt, but tasks that naturally favor a command line would become cumbersome when forced into an exclusively graphical environment. Instead of taking such radical steps, developers chose to offer both a GUI and the original command line functionality.
What I see at the moment is a large group of people attempting to fully replace the mouse and keyboard interface with a touch-only interface, simply because the consumers demand it. Personally I like touch technology, but only as an *addition* to the mouse+keyboard interface, not a full replacement.
As an aside, touchscreens tend to to produce repetitive stress injury much faster than the mouse+keyboard interface, simply because one must keep one's index finger and arm in a very still, unnatural position for the entire time one is using the interface.
Tim