Your comment would carry more weight if I knew what projects you recently contributed to.

This is exactly what shapes the areas of success for OSS. It's glaringly obvious looking back, that success perfectly matches the motivation of contributors in different areas.

And that said, it doesn't need to be so difficult to include all these pesky checkboxes in a way that they don't confuse or hinder usability for n00bish users. This used to work for Gnome 2. Never met anyone who thought Gnome 2 was too hard or counter-intuitive, they were just more or less used to it. Windows XP and Windows 7 have a lot more checkboxes if you look for them.

I think it's partly a structural problem.

I like solving problems for other people. But when I'm using open-source software, the only problems I'm really aware of are the ones I'm having.

In a commercial setting, I'm very motivated by user tests or data that demonstrates problems people are having. I've seen a lot of other developers get excited about that, too. Fixing things is fun when you can see that your actions actually help somebody.

But I've never seen an open-source project that makes it easy to get engaged in that fashion. The closest I've seen is users asking support questions on the mailing lists, which is a pretty small slice of users these days. Plugins also seem to provide a nice feedback loop like that: you make something for yourself, you throw it out there, and you see people installing it and commenting.

But broadly it seems like an unsolved problem in consumer-facing open source.

It might not be successful in a Apple way, but I'd be willing to sacrifice that to get more projects that are successful in emacs way.

How do you measure the success of it?

First of all that's a straw man as obviously all Free software developers don't feel the way he does. Secondly, it occurs to me that maybe people don't use Gnome 3 because, like me, they just don't like it. I don't like the way it looks, nor do I like the way it works. These days I go between Gnome 2, Unity, and an Open box/fbpanel setup on my different computers. I'm not in love with any of my desktops at the moment but I like them all better than Gnome 3.