You've got this backward. His aim is not to switch to something radically different. When he switches, he's looking for something more like what he once had.

You've got this backward. His aim is not to switch to something radically different. When he switches, he's looking for something more like what he once had. Linus endorses stability in UIs, and the thing that drives him away is senseless novelty-driven churn. Here's the signal that UI geeks miss with regard to Linus and DEs: His goals are utterly utilitarian; he wants the UI to save him time. That's it, nothing more. He uses Fedora because of its mostly OK out-of-the box functionality, and he picks from among the canned UIs offered at installation. He doesn't dick around with installing and configuring desktop environments, because he's not a fucking UI fetishist, as the gnome and KDE folks evidently are. He wants to press a button and have it work. It's a simple and noble goal.