Hi All, The moment GNOME 3 / Unity came out my first reaction was this is not good. I have been hearing a lot about KDE 4 getting all matured and so that was my next stop. I loved it initially as i have been a long time KDE users back in the days of KDE3. However the more i digged down the more problems started to surface. 1) KDE didn't played too well with external display. (caused lots of issues for me at one of the conference (I know its my bad why i didn't checked it before).) 2) Sound system with new pulseaudio kept switching to my HDMI output as default making it a pain in a** to switch it everytime i want to hear. 3) simple stuff which i liked to get done quickly by mouse in Gnome example SVN integration (Rabbitvcs is just plain awesome) KDESVN gave me options but still lacked with list and simple options like create a branch seems to be missing or can only be used when i have complete tree as local copy. (I am a wordpress plugin dev and for me this single option was a deal breaker) 4) Desktop Zoom in : (not used for fun but while taking sessions its good to have zoom facility) compiz gives me customizability so my SUPER+scroll is zoom in and out. not able to configure just this simple setting anywhere in KDE. all i could get is SUPER+"+" and SUPER+"-" Although i liked some simple stuff like the desktop and folderview where in i can select which folder to show on desktop was brilliant. (I replicate same on MATE using screenlet) Now all these forced me to look at alternatives. and MATE came as a good alternative. right now all my settings are working smoothly and i don't have to worry about my laptop going bonkers in last minute or so.

I agree with your point but with the names like google there is a faith attached and that is what is helping open source to a lot large extent, when students see that google want them to work on open source projects in summer of code then they understand it more better that if google is betting on open source then it must be top of its class. and also this bigness, this diversity of work area and work force is what makes google and ope source too simmilar to each other and hence get more out from each other. also your point regarding beating google, i tend to disagree, the reason is the same reason why oss was not able to cut microsoft down till high flyers like schettleworth and google joinedin is because, there is always a faith facter that helps any one to grow. and that is what we have in google, People even replace search with google, and now a common phrase is DO SOME GOOGLING, instead of DO SOME SEARCHING with this kind of faith level in the company takes a lot more than just price slashing or court cases to go down.