Windows XP Edges Out KDE in Usability Test

AstroDrabb writes "Linux, once viewed as an operating system that only computer geeks could appreciate, is today a much more user-friendly software that companies, public administrations and consumers can master almost as easily as Microsoft Corp.'s Windows XP."

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Windows XP usable?

[kasperd]

Yesterday I was trying to help my brother with some configuration problems on his Windows XP machine. Maybe it is just me that is too used to better things from four years of using Linux. But at least I found it hard to do just some very simple tasks. For example I would like to generate the list of all files in a directory including subdirectories. I had to give up, I couldn't find a function to do that. I'd also like to compare the contents of two directories. Again I had to give up. Finally I realized that perhaps it would be easier to just copy all the stuff to my Linux computer, because at least there I have all the tools I need. However the attempts to copy files bailed out with cryptic error messages. And I wasn't even given the option to continue with copying the rest of the files. And the progress indicator was useless, for more than half an hour it said there was 17 minutes left. While I had the computers connected I also found, that this XP installation by default had a directory shared with read+write permissions for everybody in the world. It is fortunate that this machine is not on the internet yet.