My personal sense is that if there should be inter-group competition in many cases, based on actual facts- for example, Ubuntu did (until recently) support a far larger number of packages that install and run cleanly than Fedora. Pointing that out has helped lead Fedora to re-assess how they handle Core/Extras, which has made all of us better off. Silliness like Mark’s recent discussion of ‘freeness’ is hurtful to everyone.

GNOME/KDE tends to have worse problems in this recard than inter-distro comparisons do, because the participants on average have a pretty lousy idea of what a good desktop is/looks like. So having ‘fact-based’ and not FUD-based discussions of relative merits is hard. Where we can have ‘fact-based’ discussions, or something close to it, we do get some good solutions- witness d-bus (which grew out of legitimate criticisms of gnome’s lack of a technology comparable to dcop), or Nat’s criticisms of the KDE clock options dialog.

You’re also kind to call my argument with Richard a debate