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There was a time I'd get people to switch from Windows to Linux; now I tell them to either upgrade to Windows 7 (if they're not on Windows 7 already) or get a Mac."
What's changed?
"Shuttleworth is the only person who can shake things up, and whenever he does everyone whines as if Shuttleworth had caused them some grave personal injustice."
People get comfy in their distributions. When Shuttleworth dictates "design" decisions with the reasoning of "just because," and as a result many people no longer find their distribution of choice comfortable, can you really blame them for being pissed off?
I know many people in this situation since Ubuntu 11.04. I'm one of them. I wasn't happy with Unity. I had to spend the time to migrate my desktop and laptop to Fedora, and get readjusted. This was annoying, but at least I'm comfortable again.
"Second, of course, is fragmentation and the fact that Linux developers change things needlessly (see GNOME 3, KDE4, PulseAudio, etc.)"
Fragmentation is inevitable in free software. People build what they want - you can't stop them, and you don't have to use what they make. The solution is not to provide the "one distribution to bind them all" and somehow dictate that everyone should use it, but to get the different ecosystems and environments following standards. They're doing that pretty well.
Anyway - you wish for "strong leadership" in the community. There will always be more than one center of strong leadership (because of personal preferences), and hence, fragmentation results.
"These days I see more and more people package their software for Ubuntu only, and provide a generic .tag.gz for other distros. I'm no Ubuntu fan, but I jump for joy every time I see this. Distros need to die."
It seems you wish for the same universality for Ubuntu as exists for Windows and Mac OS X. Do you know why those platforms are universal? Because it's relatively difficult for graphical programs to be ported between them. That problem doesn't exist for the free software ecosystem thanks to portable graphical toolkits, freedesktop.org, etc. Any good software written for distro X will soon be running on distro Y (if it doesn't already from the get-go), and that will never change.
"Third is politics. I know people who contribute to a few high-profile open source projects and I've watched them waste their time on bikeshed discussions on mailing lists and IRC. I've even watched one guy work on a project for three months only to have the design team discard it because they had a different idea in mind. The result was a long battle between programmers and designers. I guess this is a direct result of lack of leadership."
I agree that this is a huge problem. Design by committee is inefficient and ineffective. I think it would be a good idea for GNOME to have leadership elections at the end of each release cycle, to get someone to lead the GNOME project through to the next release.
"I've been hearing talks about a GNOME OS. I sincerely hope the GNOME folks go ahead and build it. As I've said before, distros need to die. So much manpower is wasted on just packaging things for different distros."
By those distro maintainers' own initiatives. They do it because they want to.
"Sometimes I feel Linus is the only guy who knows how to run a project properly. He knows how to say "no". If only we could coax him into building a distro ..."
Linus is (a) busy, and (b) has no clue about usability. He runs Xfce, for heavens' sake :)