The pink elephant is (warning: flamebait) (Score 1)

GUI coherence and ease of configuration are the list toppers.

Most alpha geeks already get it, and know about the pink elephant in the room: Mac OS X is the fabled the "BSD Desktop Platform" for those reasons alone.

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Until there are "Linux Human Interface Guidelines" (LHIG) handed down from a working group, wielding Nazi-like powers across all distros (be they powers of rating, or powers of recommendation)*, Linux will be where it is today: running in Parallels on Macs, performing tirelessly in the basements of corporate datacenters, or hosting websites run by ISVs and ISPs (and even that is being threatened by IIS in the current trends at Netcraft).

Next year, or the year after that, in perpetuity; none of them the "year of the Linux deskop." Each year will deliver more powerful, feature-rich, iterations of Mac OS X sporting a visually coherent interface that "just works."

* Rating: 0-5 stars for adherence to the "LHIG"; or "Recommended for general use, by your mother." Shame the creators of the software to follow the guidelines and end the renegade engineering mindset that "an engineer can design an interface." They can't. Look at how Java engineers fucked up the view (in MVC) in JSF by appropriating DOM and HTML attributes for their component backend.
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