I always felt that ElementaryOS was a skin-deep clone. I'm not sure that having a little bit different UX is the reason Ubuntu hasn't achieved blessed third OS

I always felt that ElementaryOS was a skin-deep clone. I'm not sure that having a little bit different UX is the reason Ubuntu hasn't achieved blessed third OS status from the Adobes of the world. I think it has more to do with there not being a unified homogenous target to code for. If the FOSS world wanted to reimplement our own Mac, I've always thought that doubling down on GNUStep would have made the most sense. If Linux + GNUstep were closer to source-compatible with the Mac, with a comparable desktop environment to boot, more of those apps would have likely made the jump. Even that I'm not sure about now though. Had GNUstep been a viable daily-use platform back in the early 2000s when OSX was ascendant, I think we'd have a different landscape today. Now with the web dominating so much, native app compatibility is less important than it was. You just need to be a big enough target for commercial vendors to care about. With luck, Chromebooks will help sort out the hardware compatibility issues as more and more of the chipsets are mainlined into the Linux kernel. In terms of software compatibility, I don't know, maybe desktop Android apps will ultimately be what we coalesce around.