Well, he's also largely responsible for early Gnome and his problematic views live on there. Whenever I read one of his posts, he's gushing over with excitement about some new technology from either Microsoft or Apple that he wants to bring to Linux, which then quickly proceeds to be a giant PITA to people who create distros, build embedded systems and so on. These projects tend to be abandoned rather quickly in the scheme of unix software (X, vim, emacs, bash - anyone replaced these 3 times in the last 10 years?). The mess he helped create (and recently admitted to be sort of guilty for, in a lengthy blog post why the Linux desktop has failed - or some similar hyperbole) is then left to deal with for everyone else.
Meanwhile, the Linux desktop (and for that matter, BSD) is perfectly usable with a well selected mixture of window managers that have been around from before I was born, audio players that don't require mysql backends, editors that work just fine from embedded systems to servers, and so on. Nobody ever missed a registry in this world. Nobody ever thought: "hey, a program that modifies its own config files is great, lets write a bunch, or use a database!" - resulting in the insanity that you can't version control your config files anymore, or keep your $HOME on NFS.
His ideas are great in the world of consumer operating systems - locked down, shiny, and limited to the "brilliance" of its designer. But I don't want to live in his world, therefore I'm very happy whenever he does something that does not involve "improving" the Linux desktop experience.
> hey, a program that modifies its own config files is great
I think that all the time. On a server I might be willing to muck around with configuration files. On a desktop? You're damned right I want a discoverable UI for configuration.
Meanwhile, the Linux desktop (and for that matter, BSD) is perfectly usable with a well selected mixture of window managers that have been around from before I was born, audio players that don't require mysql backends, editors that work just fine from embedded systems to servers, and so on. Nobody ever missed a registry in this world. Nobody ever thought: "hey, a program that modifies its own config files is great, lets write a bunch, or use a database!" - resulting in the insanity that you can't version control your config files anymore, or keep your $HOME on NFS.
His ideas are great in the world of consumer operating systems - locked down, shiny, and limited to the "brilliance" of its designer. But I don't want to live in his world, therefore I'm very happy whenever he does something that does not involve "improving" the Linux desktop experience.