Havoc Pennington has written about the future of desktop development, and the cross roads that some of the major projects are at (GNOME, Mozilla, OpenOffice.org, Evolution). He writes about the various choices moving forward, and the issues behind those choices. [Read on] [from theserverside.com]
The fact that C# is even on the list must say something about Java and the political BS that surrounds the Java Process. If you want to flame, bring it on. I've done lots of Java and C# and personally I hated the snobbery of the Java community. I tried to get into Java and Linux but I always got turned off by the constant anti-MS rhetoric. My experience with the Mono and Python communities have been great so I know it's not open source. Give it a try, ask a group of java folks what IDE to use (elipse for me), what app server (JBoss and Tomcat here) and heaven forbid what GUI to use, Swing (total crap) or SWT (SWT here) ... much less what webUI framework to use.