Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical and the Ubuntu Project has recently announced to hire a team of developers working on Desktop related applications such as OpenGL, QT, KDE and Gnome in order to improve desktop experience for Linux Users which is in my opinion an essential requirement for Linux to breach some minor barriers in the main stream Linux usage as a true alternative to proprietary Operating Systems like Window and OS X.
Fortunately this development will also boost other Linux Distributions as well and will help other Open Source Operating Systems like BSD competing to the proprietary desktops.