Mark Shuttleworth says it will take 2 years for Linux to catch up to the Mac At OSCON in July, Mark Shuttleworth, the driving force behind Ubuntu, made it clear he’s aiming for mainstream desktop adoption of Linux. While the growth figures for Ubuntu are impressive, there’s still a long way to go to match the Mac (or even Windows XP) in terms of ease of use and consistency. Shuttleworth says it will take 2 years to match the Mac in usability. No doubt some of the challenge is a result of too many different options for developers. KDE, Gnome, GTK, Qt, OpenGL et al each have their strengths and weaknesses. But the proliferation of choices means there’s unnecessary duplication of effort and competing user interface styles in different applications. In a recent blog posting, Shuttleworth has announced that his company Canonical is hiring a team of UI developers to improve the situation. What do you think of Ubuntu focusing on this area? Can it make a dent? Or is this too little too late for Linux on the desktop? Let me know your thoughts on this. Open Source