Seems Linus has started a new little flamewar 
Among KDE developers we have always stated that anti-GNOME flamewars are only among users, and while it is technically true. It doesn't prevent users who also developers in other projects to join them. I will just comment here and hopefully not contribute to the fire.
Personally I agree with Linus basic critisism of GNOME, but not his conclusion. GNOME has always been the underdog and while they have gained a lot of recent corporate support (people always root for the underdog, right?), they very much still are among linux (power-)users and developers. Being the underdog puts a lot of presure on you, especially if you have fewer developers and therefore fewer resources. You just don't stand a chance catching up by following the leader, this has forced GNOME to go a different route than KDE.
Sure I hate everything that GNOME does different from KDE; because KDE is doing things the Unix/Linux way of empowering the user and taking pragmatic decisions, but GNOME has taken chances that KDE could not take: They have risked alienated parts of their users in order to make a distinct interface, that may or may not attract users that might not otherwise use Linux. This is good for the community as a whole!
The only really bad thing about GNOME is that a few of their developers (hello, monkey-boys!) have never let go of the "There can be only one"-attitude, and continue to attack and attempt to eliminate KDE, however futile that may be.
I can understand how the Ximians provoke a general hostile environment that would provoke some users to strike back at GNOME in general, but it is wrong: Yes, GNOME sucks, but please use it if it suits you!
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I hope that some people can read from a distance to themselves
Although I disagree with the style of Linus' post I deeply hope that some important Gnomers will read this whole thing (also of course his later posts) after the dust settles a little bit as a "Hello Gnomers I want the Linux desktop becoming a great success, please don't shot into your own legs and don't tramp on others foots. It hurts me too."
1: I hope that Ximian-Novel guys finally learned their lesson and stop spreading marketing blabla and FUD with respect to other desktops.
2: I hope that Gnomers will take the Linus' remark serious that a Desktop with too less options is not usable at all as you can't use the options if you badly need them (motsly in case something went wrong). One point why an app _badly_ needs seldom used options: If something goes wrong a newbie tries to fix the problem in the app the problem occours: He won't look into the GConf-thing. You cannot separate problem and solution and claim this is a good UI decission. But how to avoid cluttering the app with options you rarely need and then in case you need them need to be quickly and intuitive accessible? Making them consistent in wording and appearance as far as possible in all applications so that you intuitively find them and use them. So yes with Gnome of today you are in many cases not confused with options but simply let alone if you have a problem. Yesterday I meat a Linux newbie using Ubuntu and I had a hard time finding out how to prevent Gaim from beeing started after login automatically, as Gaim didn't help me, and then he wanted to change his panel menu. Well the right click menu wasn't very usable...
3: And a lot of bad feelings on fd.o are caused by not-invented-here-syndrom. Someone is throwing code (that is a duplication of other earlier working implementations) into the arena as the existing solutions were not pure enough for him and expects all to use his new untested code. I hope that this attitude can stop and people say: "Okay I see there a solution but it has to much other library dependencies or has this foobar problem. Can we please settle down and iron it out, so that everyone can inmediatly benefit?" [The ones using the code already through having a review and getting it better and not needing to change too much in existing code and the others in getting quicker results and adopting a mature solution.]