Yup.

[swestrup]

From a User Interface perspective, I'm afraid I have to agree completely with this article on Why Linux has Failed and Why Linux Will Fail Again, except for the title. All of this man's complains are eminently fixable in Linux. Its even possible to fix them and STILL have a distro that a systems guru would be able to be happy with. I think the answer is to provide a For Your Convenience™ brand Drooling Moron's Linux™ (now with napkins!). It would have a whole set of wizards and smart configuration settings and would never ask any configuration quetions. The menus will be indexed by tasks, not by software, and they will do the maximum amount of hand-holding. (Note that this requires that the distro already be more sophisticated and more polished in UI than any I've yet come across.)  There WOULD (somewhere) be an 'I'm not a drooling moron' button, that should the user ever click it, he would go into mere-moron mode. There would be a few configuration options here, (colors, resolution, etc.) but not much else. There would also be a new button to click to advance to 'Naive User' mode (perhaps with a time limited skill-testing question). An actual systems guru would be able to find and click on all of the buttons to get himself into guru mode in less than 2 minutes, while we expect Joe Moron to never actually get out of drooling moron mode.

Then again, if we're even more subtle and slick, we could actually have each mode try to make the user think, just a bit, and see if we can't slowly educate them.