IMO, the reason desktop linux never took off is that you need to draw developers to the platform, and developing desktop linux apps completely sucks. I recently

IMO, the reason desktop linux never took off is that you need to draw developers to the platform, and developing desktop linux apps completely sucks. I recently wrote my first large gtk app and was appalled at how painful it was. Gtk has been around for like 15 years and half of it's widgets are unuseable and the api is clunky. I don't understand why kde/qt lost so decisively to gnome in terms of support by the distributions, although I will admit gtk apps tend to look better. Things may have been better if QT had gotten more community support, or at least more designers working on pretty themes. There can't be many experienced linux desktop developers who would voluntarily do their next project on that platform. As Steve Ballmer famously bellowed in his drunken rant, "DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS!!"