I don’t think it’s ever going to happen without corporate backing. Maybe community run efforts can afford to have a few volunteers do some coding in their spare time, but volunteers don’t generally want to work on the boring stuff like the polish that users expect nowadays, and they’re never going to be able to run things like R&D, focus groups, etc, to get ahead of Fortune 500 companies. All they can do is see what works and copy, that’s basically all the community developed stuff has ever done.

Look at ChromeOS, it’s already got more users than Linux. If the Year of Linux ever happens it’ll look more like the Year of Chrome