There are some distributions Like Caldera Work Station 3.1.1 that have a great install and a good appearance, but then their permissions are so strict and "immutable" that an end user can hardly move an icon around on their own desktop. Obviously a sloppy loose permission scheme isn't any good either. What's important is for the end user to have control over the system; and above that, easy intuitive control over the system.
People who know the command line love it, but it takes a long time to learn it, and particularly when it comes to the nuance of system configuration. People love the Macintosh because of its perceived ease of use. Actually Apple is responsible for Windows becoming popular. Apple refused to license their GUI based operating system to anyone else, and so virtually every other computer assembler (manufacturer) had to use Windows. Unfortunately Windows never had any real clarity of user interface, an annoying registry system that was probably actually intended to be a copy protection scheme, tons of partially incompatible hardware, and even more software that often wouldn't work as claimed. Nevertheless in spite of all its weaknesses M$ became dominant.
Now Linux is here, and it has great promise for the future; however it presently suffers from a shortage of good desktop software for the home user. It seems just now that it is turning the corner. That being said, it's difficult to get "Joe Microsoft" to even try Linux. You virtually have to give them the computer and install it for them, and even then they may not be very inclined to use it. Another issue is that big box stores like CompUSA don't push it, because they don't see any profit in it for themselves.
A lot of the problem too is that "Linux" considered as a complete system isn't equal. There are in fact wide discrepancies from distribution to distribution. I personally consider every distribution that relies exclusively on KDE as the Desktop GUI to be on the lame side. The Xandros beta was a good example of this. It's a very attractive Debian distribution, and you can install ICEwm on it very easily through "apt-get;" but then the developers somehow saw fit to user their own desktop manager which inhibited the use of anything other than KDE. Caldera will allow the installation of ICE, but somehow inhibits any serious customization of it. ELX has a great button launcher system system for KDE; but as they have implemented it, it's total overkill. Again the last I knew of it, there wasn't any provision for customizing it. I know of a reader on this list who considers ELX to be the best distribution out there.
Mandrake 8.2 seems to have a very nice and for the most part complete easy to use control panel. The system is both stable and easy to configure save some weird quirks like their blanket security permissions scheme which doesn't provide for the control of nuance by the end user. If the Mandrake system gave a warning message that it was overriding user set permissions and the reason why and where to change it, it would go a long way towards better user friendliness. Nevertheless, having sincerely tried many distributions, Mandrake 8.2 is the best bet out there at the present time. Even so, there have been posters on this list who have stated Mandrake 8.2 was giving them too many problems.
W. Wayne Liauh wrote:
George (Joe Linux) is probably the only person on the island who has tried essentially every Linux distro on earth. I know he has at least tried Mandrake 8.2, Red Hat 7.3, SuSE 8 (by me on his behalf),
