Will The Free Software Desktop Ever Make It?

Luc Verhaegen, the former Novell employee who previously worked on the RadeonHD driver and is known for butting heads with other X developers and making ambitious proposals like modularizing DRI and Mesa drivers, has out a new blog post. In something not too far off from where he said the Linux desktop will be dead if Keith Packard got his way in merging graphics drivers back into the X Server, his new blog post is entitled "This way, the free software desktop is never going to make it."

You can read it here, but to sum it up he had problems with an Ubuntu 10.04 LTS installation that led to his current mood being set to pissed off. "I forgot to put apostrophes around "Panning", and i got greeted with a bleeding panel, with no option to easily get around it. What on earth are we thinking here? This is Ubuntu LTS, with radeon, KMS, plymouth and xorg.conf.d. 5 nails in the free software desktops coffin."

Do you think the free software desktop will ever make it? Is 2011 finally the year of the Linux desktop? Let us know in the forums.