The common wisdom that "linux will never be viable on the desktop" is frustrating. How user friendly and problem-free does ubuntu have to get before people stop claiming this? All drivers working by default isn't good enough? To install software on windows you have to buy it or download shady .exe files, how is this better or more user-friendly than graphical software repository?
Linux has come a long way in the context of driver support. It has not come very far at all in terms of ease of use.
When something goes wrong on Ubuntu for example, the advice is 99% of the time to open a terminal window and start running commands. This is impractical/unworkable for the majority of users.
Ubuntu might be the most forward thinking Linux distribution in terms of ease of use, but for every step forward they take two steps back.
With Unity for example doing relatively "simple" things like configuring the firewall have seemingly disappeared (as well as much other settings). They seem to have just deleted the majority of the UI and said "we'll just use search for everything!" Without thinking through discoverability.
I think Linux is great as a server operating system. But the people behind it just aren't capable of thinking like "normal" users and thus are completely unable to produce something for those users to use.
Right now the most likely contender for a Linux desktop is some kind of Android fork that extends what Google has managed to accomplish to a larger hardware set (or just take Chromium and expand that).
Usually that advice isn't badly intentioned but just because people are used to doing things that way. Just as an example, if you download a package or something even if you could use GDebi Package installer to install it with the gui, every tutorial you ever see will probably tell you do `sudo dpkg -i` or something. Nearly every Linux problem a 'regular' user is likely to have falls into this category - there's probably a semi-sane way to do it with the GUI, but everyone who uses Linux will think it's 10x easier to just give someone a command instead of clicking through some lengthy graphical process.
Dude, other things exist in the world beside Unity. Also, Unity, and the Gnome settings as part of the GNOME DE are pretty unrelated, not sure what you're on about with the Proxy talk.
> Linux is not yet "ready for the desktop," and I'm doubtful it will ever be—at least not in the sense that an average person could use it full-time without any assistance.
By this definition, Windows and Mac OS X are both not ready for the desktop. I have had "average people" come to me and rely on me for assistance with both (especially Windows) many times.
