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For those who are interested, this is most likely the FramaKey distribution at http://www.framakey.org/En/Index (English link). There are two versions, a full version that includes OpenOffice, and a lite version with AbiWord. For those who understand French, their sister site FramaSoft is a great resource for finding best-of-breed open source software sorted by domain.

In france, we have such a site, its called Framasoft it contains not only a nice classification of softwares by domain (for Windows, Linux, MacOS), but also some articles, manuals.

It's a poor platform for a desktop OS, plain and simple

I'd be interested to hear in which way. If you put the gaming market aside, it is a very competitive desktop OS (and a significant number of administrations, offices and other organisms selected it as their main work desktop platform). Applications ? It has. Stability and efficience at managing resources ? It has. Connectivity ? It has.

and the efforts to turn it into a good desktop OS are too splintered and half-assed.

I suspect that you think so because there's no unique initiative towards a friendly Linux desktop environment - you have a several distributions, toolkits, or desktop environments to choose from, which can be quite intimidating at first. But there are Linux distributions specifically aiming at providing an out-of-the-box, easy-to-use desktop environment smoothly integrating everything you may want. Knoppix or Ubuntu are just two popular examples of that trend - trying to provide something coherent without too many compromises.

Each little distro can then focus on the hardware it's designed for, and the task it's meant to do, rather than trying to cram every OSS project under the sun onto 6 DVD's and calling it a "Windows Killer".

The goal of the distributions isn't to cram "every OSS project" on its CDs. Generalist distributions like Debian, SuSE or Fedora try to encompass most of what you can expect to do with a computer in the easiest way possible. And that's why things like package managers or networked installer CDs were invented: to make your life easier. Linux isn't a "geek-only" system anymore.

Finally, when speaking about "Joe Sixpack's exposure" to Linux and his possible reactions to it, you may want to give a try at this article (English version here ), where the author compared the ease of installation and use of Linux Mandrake 9.2 and Windows 2000 by letting his unexperimented wife handle it by herself. The result demonstrates that (at least for her) Linux was easier to install and use for her daily tasks.

A common mistake is to point at the case of people used to Windows attempting to use Linux and being "lost" in an alien environment. The only valuable point to take into account is how people who never used a computer before can find their marks under Linux. That's two pretty different things to consider, I'd say.

Notice that there is also an English version of Framasoft. It's really a nice website for Windows users and it replaced telecharger.com for most of my friends who are still using Windows.

I recently found a French site with the same goals: Framasoft. This may help you.

When I need some software for Windows, I usually find what I want on Framasoft. It lists only Free software but it's in French. The English translation doesn't seem very complete but you can try the Google translation.

When I need some software for Windows, I usually find what I want on Framasoft. It lists only Free software but it's in French. The English translation doesn't seem very complete but you can try the Google translation.