I have this problem that, unlike what most people seem to think is obvious, I *don't* want my desktop to operate like Mac. I find using a Mac desktop is like using a text editor other than my preferred one (which is increasingly necessary as text editing is moving to being whatever javascript monstrosity is attached to the collaboration or notebook platform you're forced to use); I'm always fighting with it and trying to work around it's little assumptions that are different from what I want.
Lots of the Linux desktops have been moving in directions that are nominally to make them more Mac-like. I think they often don't really do, or they *would* if everybody else did what they thought everybody else should do. But, as a result, I recently went back to FVWM, because I can make it work the way I want to. I used xfce for a number of years, but as time went by, it was getting harder and harder to configure it to do what I want. Giving in to what I find as the extremely annoying trend of "client-side decorations" was the last straw for me.
FVWM's configuration system is *exactly* the sort of thing people point at when they try to say that it makes Linux unusable on the desktop. And, it's exactly what makes it usable for me.
The broader point is: the original article seemed to indicate that having a choice of desktops was a *flaw*. It confuses users, or something. But, from my point of view, having a choice of desktop managers is the killer feature of Linux on the desktop. You aren't stuck with the default assumptions of either Windows or Mac. Yeah, there are still a lot of default assumptions built in, but there's a lot more flexibility than you find in other worlds. The ascendence of GTK (linked with GNOME) and the assumptions it's trying to force on the LInux desktop world are not healthy, in my opinion, as it's going to make it harder and harder for people to configure desktops if they don't like the built-in assumptions of GTK. But, at least for now, you can still get things to work the way you want if what you want doesn't happen to match either the majority, or what somebody has convinced the majority to think they want (or at least accept).