Vincent, it's true that users don't get passionate about GNOME. But they also don't get passionate about Windows, even though you can get boatloads of crack for it. Would users get more passionate about Windows if it shipped with a little pig that would sit in corner of the panel and sometimes make funny sounds? Would it be really cool if the pig was called Henry and was actually some internal joke from Microsoft?

Sorry, but users don't give a flying fuck. Only people who already believe that "GNOME is teh best desktop environment on the planet" (and actually understand what the that sentence means) will think that Wanda is cute. It's not that I think the fish is really harmful. It's an easteregg and that's fine -- just don't kid yourself and think that it's building any passion or loyalty in (real) users, because it isn't.

The way to get loyal users is to make GNOME reliable, useful and fast, write more applications like Evince, fix the session manager, somehow convince distributions that they should scrap Firefox and ship Epiphany instead, get rid of retarded "This application can't be automatically restarted" dialogs, make GNOME office competitive, first with OpenOffice, then with MS Office, and fix all the annoying bugs.