As for "things don't go wrong", I have to laugh.

Sorry but your subjective and anecdotal experience is not cutting it. It is not the applicable for most people who wouldn't be able to install windows or Mac themselves either. Alternatively it is based on what you personally consider unacceptable which is lame as far as arguments go since I can also complain about the lockdown of the Macs, their Fischer Prize GUI, their lack of applications etc.

Fact of the matter is that if GNU/Linux is installed for a non-technical user by a professional, as their Windows or Mac would have been, then it will most likely not require any further support.

You have partially misread my comment: I said that Linux WAS acceptable if the user is only going to use a web browser.

I have not misread your comment. I find it ridiculous. GNU/Linux is acceptable for anything from Web Browsing, to media using, to media manipulation, to office work, to programming to gaming (as long as the game has been written for it). What you say is plain and simple FUD, not at all supported by experience.

You have partially misread my comment: I said that Linux WAS acceptable if the user is only going to use a web browser. But, frankly, ANY graphical OS is going to be acceptable if the user will only be interacting with it by following a short series of static steps every single time; if there were a way to run a modern browser directly in DOS, then DOS would be an acceptable solution for that type of user.

As for "things don't go wrong", I have to laugh. When I installed Debian (which was my most recent Linux experience), the installer CD booted, and then refused to actually install, saying it was unable to detect a CD-ROM drive. The time before that, I installed Xubuntu on a Pentium III laptop, and the graphical updater program failed on its first run, leaving the apt-get database locked. Turned out that this was a known bug, which had been discovered months earlier, but since it was possible to fix the problem by resort to the command line, it wasn't deemed important enough for either a new CD image OR a note on the website. Then there was the bug on another laptop where the autoconfiguration of xorg.conf for the video driver turned on an option which was not available on that card, and launching the terminal program would crash X11 and terminate the session. (There was a workaround: switch to 16-bit color instead. But, of course, Linux doesn't give you a GUI option to change color depths, so that wasn't an option. I was able to do it with a terminal session, but I guarantee you that most users would, by that time, have dug out the Windows install CDs and be heading back to Redmond-land as fast as their CPUs could carry them.)

As for "autodetecting trackpads" — sure it accepts the trackpad's input, but I'm talking about the GUI, not the input device support. None of the environments I have seen give you any configuration controls for trackpads, displaying the mouse controls instead. Both Windows and the Mac were smart enough to at least give you both and then warn you that one of the two wouldn't work as long ago as 1995, whereas Linux GUIs just blithely assume that everyone has a mouse. If that doesn't sound bad to you, then either you've never used a trackpad or you must be one of the people — a significantly small minority, in my local and subjective experience — who like "touch to click" turned on, since Linux ALWAYS turns it on by default and does not provide any GUI to turn it back off. And any GUI which resorts to "you have to use the command line for that" is a failure as a GUI.

But the day-to-day experience of Linux is still something I would recommend to new users only if they either have unlimited access to a Linux guru or else will never do anything outside a web browser so they can memorize a simple set of steps to deal with those few pieces of the OS which will encroach on their lives.[...]

What a load of FUD. I've given GNU/Linux to people who have no access to a tech or use it just for browsing with no problem. Similarly, I've seen people struggle with Macs just as well, which just goes to show how biased your opinion is. No, way too many things Don't go wrong as long as you explain to people to take care to use their sudo rights carefully. No reinventing the wheel is not necessary.

It's like someone took the worst weaknesses of the GUIs of Windows Vista and Mac OS X and built them all into one unholy hybrid, and then decided it wasn't awkward enough and made the desktop environment a changeable option.

Seriously, you're just rabidly hating it because it's not Mac. Nothing else.

Right. Wake me when Linux manages copy and paste between programs (beyond plain text) as well as the Mac did in 1986. Or has human-readable directory names in the default file system structure. Or auto-detects hardware well enough to show corresponding controls for a trackpad instead of a mouse on laptops. Or has a sufficient control structure that users never have to edit xorg.conf. Or survives poor OpenGL support gracefully. (Or ships a distro which comes with a default theme which isn't fugly, although that's a subjective matter.)

Copy-Paste has never been a problem for me. Human readable directories in the root filesystem are not necessary. It autodetects trackpads perfectly. I haven't had to edit xorg.conf for the last year at least.

And anyway, just because GNU/Linux does not have the features you think are required, does not make it bad. I can in the same way complain about the faults of Macs as well when they don't have the features of GNU/Linux. In short, you're just using your subjective judgement to slander a whole OS with FUD.

I try Linux out roughly every 6 to 12 months, depending on how busy I am. I would really like to enjoy it, so I keep trying, but so far I haven't. Last time I tried Debian, because I wanted to install on a PowerPC Mac Mini I have acquired and Ubuntu doesn't support PowerPC any more. I admit it: the Debian installer (finally) achieved a level which I would consider sufficient for non-computer-savvy users.

(And, incidentally, the difference was not anything to do with the "graphical" part of the GUI. It was that the descriptive text for the configuration questions no longer assumed that the user knew what the significance of each item was. All the earlier installers I've seen for Linux would ask for configurations without explaining what they were or whether it made any difference what the answers were. All the LiveCDs in the world won't make up for poorly-worded text with no online help.)

But the day-to-day experience of Linux is still something I would recommend to new users only if they either have unlimited access to a Linux guru or else will never do anything outside a web browser so they can memorize a simple set of steps to deal with those few pieces of the OS which will encroach on their lives. Way too many ways things can go wrong, too many options for advanced users turned on by default, too many ways to easily change the GUI in such a way that talking someone through something over the phone becomes a practical impossibility, too many programs which reinvent the wheel with respect to GUI widgets, an almost total lack of documentation, too much reliance on the command line (which is instafail in GUI terms), and of course the main distributions give you a choice between the fugly-but-functional GNOME and the busy-and-inconsistent KDE 4. It's like someone took the worst weaknesses of the GUIs of Windows Vista and Mac OS X and built them all into one unholy hybrid, and then decided it wasn't awkward enough and made the desktop environment a changeable option.

So, yeah, the Linux GUI/desktop environment is evolving. But not fast enough or well enough to really make it compete with the non-free alternatives, and always with the insistence that Linux should be mediocre at doing everything, just in case, rather than being really good at a few specific things. I'm starting to think of Linux the way I think of the Democratic Party, or the more liberal Christian Churches — their main function is to prevent other options which otherwise might appeal to the same people (the Green Party, or agnosticism, or the Haiku Project) from gaining support by — to quote an analysis I read a few years ago — "sucking all the air out of that space".

(And actually, now that I think of it, a standard VM along the lines I proposed would help a great deal. Right now, developing a program which uses sustained AV for Linux is a pretty serious undertaking, because there are so many API alternatives that it's difficult for an outsider to learn which ones are suitable, and since all of them are open-source, almost none of them are guaranteed to be around and well-supported for the foreseeable future. If there were a VM included with popular distro X using some particular fast, low-level set of APIs for AV stuff, that would constitute a guarantee for developers that popular distro X has a fast, low-level set of APIs for AV stuff which was unlikely to change or be discontinued without significant public note and documentation of alternatives.)

I don't like Linux — it has dealt with its rough GUI edges by glossing over them, and an elephant with a towel tossed over over it isn't really hidden.

I beg to differ. GNU/Linux has certainly not glossed over any rough GUI edges and the GUI is therefore continuously improving and evolving according to the wishes of the users.

As for the Virtual Machines, while I agree that it's a nice solution, unless they reach the level where one can play games in them, it's unlikely to be a solid solution for people who don't want to switch for this reason.

For one thing, there will never be Linux versions of Windows software if there's a Windows version and most Linux desktop users are running Windows full speed by dual-booting. You WANT Windows to be a second-class citizen, and virtual machines preserve 100% compatibility while adding just that extra little fillip of performance hit. And "virtual machine as built-in OS feature for switchers" has already been shown to work in the marketplace: if you don't mind my reusing the example over and over again, Apple did it with Mac OS 9/X. The trick is to make it trivially easy for new users, who won't want to learn a lot about the guts to make it work.

The underlying guts of Linux are technically superior to those of Windows. It's only in the realm of GUI stuff that one can argue on Windows' behalf. If Linux could just convince everyone that a VM was a suitable means of easing the switch, they would make a tremendous step forward.

I don't like Linux — it has dealt with its rough GUI edges by glossing over them, and an elephant with a towel tossed over over it isn't really hidden. I'd much rather see the Haiku Project finish their open-source OS and take over the market than see Linux do so, and I prefer Mac OS X to either one. But if the choice is purely Linux or Windows, there's really no choice: Linux every time.