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Make Linux "Gorgeous," Says Ubuntu Leader
OSS_ilation writes "They say beauty is only skin deep, but when it comes to Linux and the free software movement, people like Mark Shuttleworth think looks have an important part to play. On his blog and an article on SearchOpenSource.com, Shuttleworth and a slew of open source end users say that the look and feel of open source is also a matter of wider acceptance among enterprise players who are used to Windows, yet crave Mac OS X and the functionality of Linux. 'If we want the world to embrace free software, we have to make it beautiful,' Shuttleworth said. "We have to make it gorgeous. We have to make it easy on the eye. We have to make it take your friend's breath away.' With the early success of Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10, Shuttleworth and company may be onto something."
A person who has never used a computer turns on three which are arranged in front of them... A Windows box, a Mac box and a Linux box... all look identical on the outside. They receive no prompting. Which do they begin to try to learn to use?
Finally, someone who is addressing the root cause of why Linux continues to trail market leaders in desktop share. In addition to making it "beautiful", developers need to continue adding out-of-the-box widgets/features to prevent someone from ever needing to modify a script or enter a terminal window if they didn't want to. If they could address both of these 'issues', Linux would have a fighting chance against Windows desktops.
IMO - Microsoft doesn't dominate because it is better, it dominates because of great marketing and ease of use (even for groups such as the disabled). My grandmother can use XP Home, but if I have Linux up, she completely freezes. Sure, there's some grandmas that know perl scripting, but who wants to jump in and start compiling code just so they can play bridge with their friends over the net?
Crack - Free with every butt and set of boobs
and when things don't Just Work (tm), make it Really Easy to Fix (tm). gui eye candy is nice and all, but it does no good if the underlying software is flakey and generally hard to use.
Fortune Magazine: What has always distinguished the products of the
companies you've led is the design aesthetic. Is your obsession with design
an inborn instinct or what?
Steve Jobs: We don't have good language to talk about this kind of thing.
In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer. It's interior decorating.
It's the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be
further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a
man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers
of the product or service. The iMac is not just the colour or translucence or
the shape of the shell. The essence of the iMac is to be the finest possible
consumer computer in which each element plays together.
On our latest iMac, I was adamant that we get rid of the fan, because it is
much more pleasant to work on a computer that doesn't drone all the time.
That was not just "Steve's decision" to pull out the fan; it required an
enormous engineering effort to figure out how to manage power better and do
a better job of thermal conduction through the machine. That is the furthest
thing from veneer. It was at the core of the product the day we started.
This is what customers pay us for--to sweat all these details so it's easy
and pleasant for them to use our computers. We're supposed to be really good
at this. That doesn't mean we don't listen to customers, but it's hard for
them to tell you what they want when they've never seen anything remotely
like it.
http://www.fortune.com/fortune/2000/01/24/app6.ht
...goes all the way to ring 0.
Imagine having a clean and clear desktop. Make things a little bigger for your mother. Make them a little smaller for the numbers nerd.
When you buy that ridiculously high resolution dell laptop, all the icons and text doesn't shrink to the size of warnings for health meds.
While Ubuntu is relatively polished and most of the stuff "just works", the default baby-shit-brown color scheme is hideous.
So, while I would agree that Linux needs some beautification, I don't trust anyone at Ubuntu to do it!
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Linux actually needs both to really compete on the desktop. Sure, don't let drivers and other core libraries slide but it needs serious help in the UI department. Linux developers always speak of standards and fault MS for never following them - how about Linux having a UI standard? Too many things I use I have to relearn the UI to some degree. At least in Windows (for the most part) there is a standard in the tool bars and menus. File, Edit, etc.
Why can't you have well-designed ergonomics AND great eye-candy? Why deny that both serve a useful place at the table?
Another thing that's needed is something similar to Apple's original User Interface Guidelines, so that all of the applicatons on the platform are consistent from both a usability and visual standpoint.
Having consistent dialogs, button placements, menus, and so on tend to make a platform a LOT more accessible.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
In principal, I agree.
In practice, it's not what makes people switch. They will switch when there is an overwhelming need for something that is not provided by their current PC.
Otherwise, they don't switch.
Despite Apple's temporarily high visibility (pre vista media onslaught) these days, they know from experience getting people to switch even -if- you have a beautiful desktop and good advertising marketing budgets is tough.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Too many people need to give up their egos, use GUI toolkits they don't like, and admit they don't know jack about what looks good and what doesn't.
People don't crave OS X because it's beautiful, but because it Just Works. The beauty of OS X is way beyond skin deep. To achieve it you need things like consistency, subtle cues that inform the user of what's happening, you need to remove clutter etc.
You need to think about every element of the UI not in isolation, but in relation to all the other elements. Mere eye candy just doesn't cut it. Shuttleworth sort of admits this in the blog entry, but bulldozes over it earlier on, when he says I'm not talking about inner beauty, not elegance, not ideological purity... pure, unadulterated, raw, visceral, lustful, shallow, skin deep beauty.
Sorry Mark, but you're starting at the wrong end here. You need inner beauty, in the shape of e.g. a consistent framework, and at the most fundamental level, just plain consideration of how the user interacts with the application, before you can start working on the skin.
And that is why Linux distributions as we know them will never compete with OS X. You'd need to toss X and its bazillion GUI toolkits, and replace them with something new. Then you'd need to organize a Human Interface Police, whose job it is to kick developers who don't follow the guidelines. And I suspect that won't go over well among the Linux developer community with its "free to do whatever the hell I like" mindset.
...is that it has to be applied regularly. New major version of the software, new config dialogs, new wizards, new documentation? Better start redoing a lot of polish. Also, let's not forget that a polished turd is nothing more than a polished turd. Polish is only something you need when you already have a solid product with rough edges. So while I think Linux could use a layer of polish in a few places, I hardly think it's a big driver. Yes, people will flock to Ubuntu over other distros with a little polish. But is that really what drives adoption of Linux as a whole? I think it's more hard questions like:
- Does Firefox work on most webpages?
- Does OpenOffice interoperate well with MS Office files?
- Does GIMP support 16-bit color/CMYK separation?
- Does Thunderbird interoperate well with our exchange server?
The really hard work is being done all the time by the people making fundamental improvements to their applications. What Ubuntu is doing with polish is more like maxing the performance for the Olympics. While it's important to get the most out of the foundation you have, it's the foundation that has to improve. Though I suppose this is a case where I'd like to eat my cake and have it too...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Of course you should have great ergonomics and eye candy.
Mark Shuttleworth said that the problem that Linux didn't look good enough.
That's not really entirely true, it looks OK. But the ergonomics still suck really hard for
many things. It works reasonably nastily.
Comparing to Windows isn't remotely good enough.
When it starts to be an ergonomic horse race between Mac OS X and Billionaire
Linux, then that's progress. We're about as far in that direction as Afghanistan is sending turbaned men to Mars.
In fact, a number of Mac users have complained, rightfully, that some more recent
MacOSX releases sacrifice ergonomics for eye candy.
Sooo, if Mark said that "pretty" is a feature, will we see less members of the I-hate-vista-because-a-lot-of-people-will-use-it-a nd-also-it-looks-nice-so-it's-even-worse-and-it-ha s-nothing-my-good- old-terminal-couldn't-do club?
Does Thunderbird interoperate well with our exchange server?
Why would anybody want to do this? Take a full-featured office management server and strip it down to basic email because that's all the client can handle? Huh?
Instead of making it look "gorgeous", how about focusing on making Linux look "consistent"?
Windows and Mac OS sure didn't achieve their easily identifiable "looks" by promoting dozens of inconsistent GUI toolkits.
There has to be a balance, that is true. You can't have an OS that is completely window dressing, but at the same time, if you want people to sit in front of your machine for hours and hours without having to be the sort of person who are attracted to computers for their own sake, it has to look good and function well.
If you build an OS that is rock solid, but its UI is command-line or a crappy GUI, you may well have a successor to the mainframe on your hands, which would be profitable, but it was my impression that Linux was not supposed to be some cryptic mainframe update.
A big issue, that I think actually plays into what you are saying is the sheer number of possibilities that exist for Linux desktop UIs. I think one of the best and worst things about Linux (and Unices in general), is the fact that you can have a bazillion UIs and every other distro has their own UI or variation on that UI.
Fact is, more than having a "pretty" desktop, you need a *standard* desktop. One that people can learn to use on Ubuntu, and if they want to go to a Red Hat distro, or possibly even Gentoo, they see the same thing on their screen. When they go to their friend's house, they can access the same interface (personalizations excluded) that they have at home. BUT, they don't just have the option to have it, they MUST use that default unless they know enough about the system to figure out how to enable another Window Manager.
Yes, I mean that the selection of Gnome, KDE or whatever needs to be removed from easy selection on the login screen. They need to login with Linux GUI (whatever the heck that would be) and then, only if they know enough about the system, can they change it.
Yes, I can hear the howls about options and freedom, but honestly, you have to review your goals here. People like having freedom, but need standards to function, at least as an initial default. Linux succeeds because it is diverse, but it also falls short in some areas, like user acceptance, because it is diverse. I've been a UNIX user and admin for over a decade, and even today, I can barely stand to use a UNIX (or Linux) box as a desktop machine, even through its 10x more stable than my stupid Windows XP box. It also means that if I want to try another distro, I'm stuck trying to relearn where stuff is or have to retreat to the command line. That works for me or you, but not for Mom or Dad or Grandma who don't even grasp the concept of a UNIX command line.
We don't need a "pretty" UI. We need an "attractive" UI which is standardized and has enough out of the box default acceptance across distros, so that anyone who has ever used a Linux box can find all of the internals they need by clicking on the same things, and at the same time, is sharp enough looking so that people feel like someone has taken the time to make the system friendly for them. At that point, the other UIs need to become hobbies, and shed the wasted development resources that could be used by the kernel and or drivers. Or at the very least, stop trying to push their interface to the top.
Personally, I think Linux acceptance will really come into its own when "Linux" means the same default user experience no matter what distro they are using. Think about it, Windows desktop users don't give a shit if their box is running AMD or Intel or if it is using FAT or NTFS, *Windows* to them is the interface that sits on top of all of that stuff. The only way *Linux* will evolve into a competor in that space is to realize that desktop users only care that their programs run fast enough (Linux already has that covered), that they can use popular tools and that they know where everything they need to use is in the UI.
A GUI does not have to be super-awesome. Not the default one anyway. "Linux", the brand, just needs a good UI that everyone knows and everyone uses right out of the box. The distro can still have Gnome, KDE, or any window manager, widget set or anything else that they want, but they have to be an option for power use
I agree that appearance is important. Humans function better when they have pleasant environments. It's also true that Linux distros often really suck when it comes to basics of HCI and even simple artistic elements that would make things a lot more pleasant and usable.
But it really bugs me when people talk about aesthetics while the internal structure isn't sound. I'm happily using Dapper Drake, but it wasn't trivial to setup correctly with some of the hardware I wanted to use. But there's the recent slashdot article that mentions the upgrade nightmare when going from Dapper Drake to Edgy Eft. And there are even more fundamental problems with Linux. The graphics system in Linux is held together with duct tape. It's just WAY too easy to break, and there is no kind of structure to it. There should be APIs and standard mechanisms for handling graphics devices in a general, but they just don't exist (and don't tell me about DRI -- it's only one step in the right direction). I'm told that there are many other facilities, like networking, that aren't a whole lot better.
Look at it this way: If Microsoft had gotten their shit together in the beginning and written a decent operating system, rather than cobbling DOS and some other crap together and sticking a GUI on top, then more of us would be using Windows. Instead, they shipped us crap, we figured that out, and we moved on to other systems. For a very long time, Mac OS (9 and before) was all surface, with an embarrassing OS under the hood. One of the few operating systems that was actually ENGINEERED well from the ground up was BeOS, but that didn't fair well against Microsoft's marketing.
The fact is, "Linux" lacks coherency. It's not "Linux." It's a Linux kernel, some GNU tools over there, X11 bolded on over here, GTK or Qt slapped on over yonder... No two groups actually get together and decide to come up with an elegant system. Instead, they compete with each other, end up working around each other's mistakes, and then leave it up to the distros to try to make it all work together. Ha.
I'll just tell you a dirty little secret from my experience with writing device drivers: The NT kernel's interfaces for handling devices like graphics cards, network devices, printers, and pretty much anything else you want to use, they put Linux to shame. NT may not perform as well, be as stable, or be as secure as Linux, but it's engineered with vastly more coherent internal structure. Linux is good code with poorly-designed interfaces, while Windows is lousy code with well-designed interfaces (actually, POSIX rocks, but I'm talking about kernel structure and device management).
No kidding. I don't think the US has even thought about the turban part.
Not enough TurbanWare makers in the districts of the appropriation committee congressdroids.
Here's one problem indemic to the open source paradigm: Things like "beauty" or "ease of use" or "how you ought to do things" varies widely from one group to another. Getting everyone that develops an app for Linux to agree on one set of interface standards makes for a pretty steep uphill battle. Take a look at Gnome versus KDE: Where does an "Okay" button belong on a dialog box, left or right?
The opportunity that the open source community has is to leverage the capacity for development that has made FOSS a viable contender for hard drive space to develop something entirely new in computing. Projects like Open Office and the GIMP are great, offering alternatives to commercial software where options weren't available before. And development of those products should continue, but to what end? Sure, there's value in being able to provide a drop in, no training required replacement for the Microsoft software stack if it can be done with open standards and security. But if all you're doing is following the development of major software vendors, you're relying on them to set the pace of innovation. Even the venerated Linus Torvalds made Linux because he wanted to have a Unix-like system running on his commodity hardware (yeah, yeah, let the hatemail come).
So, tell me, where is the group that comes along and says, "Here's a new way of using a computer. Everyone come help us build it, it's gonna be great" ?? Why, after all these years, am I still forced to use the paradigm of paper-based documents (PDF, RTF, e-mail, web) to communicate most information, even if it never hits paper? Why do I have to gather information by reading text, line by line, down a page? Where's the visual depth to our digital world? Where's the alternative information delivery?
And I'm not calling for a bunch of new input or output devices that will change the way we work with a computer, though those are needed as well. Given what we have (mouse, keyboard, monitor), we ought to be able to come up with something better.
Take, for instance, the Civilization IV interface as a model for systems administration. Replace cities with servers, continents become networks, nations become domains, etc. Pan and zoom around your network, click on users to see what they're up to, double click on servers to look at their configuration and make edits to it, adjust automation, etc. etc. User apps have other opportunities for data navigation, communication, resource location, etc. But we've got to get ourselves off of the paper paradigm first. How do we do that?
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
I agree with one of your points, and it is one of the main problems I have seen with the several Linux distributions I have tried. I am writing this from my Ubuntu 6.06 laptop installation. I just recently removed Windows completely on favour of Ubuntu after it told me that "Windows cant prove the legality of this installation" and it did not allowed me to enter to MY computer even in the so called "safe mode" after I added 1GB of ram (WinXP).
The previous is to show you pissed off I *am* of Microsoft offerings... and my Windows XP is so legal I've got a sticker under my laptop with windows serial number for WinXP. Thats stupid behaviour.
But now, returning to Linux, at least to Ubuntu. Since I installed I have had so *many* problems specifically with one of the things you say, the software is flakey, it is terribly unstable. The hibernating function works half the time and the suspend does not work (you see a whole paragraph stating that it is "experimental").
My wireless card is *supposed* to be supported and although it IS detected (broadcom 4093) it does not work so I had to add a PCMCIA card, neither ALSA or ESD work 100%, they hang half the time consuming 99% of processor, Amarok sucks as it is terribly buggy, some random applications just "die" in the middle of use without any message (the window just *disappears*).
I pondered on upgrading to 6.10 but then I saw all the reviews and issues people has been having. If you go to Ubuntu forum you can see a poll where there among 1/3 of the users are having issues, 1/3 are having major problems and 1/3 say everything is alright hence upgrading is playing roulette and if you lose your system might become unusuable (with a probability of 33%).
I would give good money for a replacement of Windows, I would love it to be based on Linux but I need it to JUST WORK. I know OSX might be what I am looking for, unfortunately it is not available for my platform of choice (HP Pavilion notebook) so I cant get it.
I love linux, I work in it more than 8 hours a day (at work and at home) but I believe it strength is also it weakness, as someone else wrote on the Ubuntu slashdot story we need a distribution that enforces TERRIBLY STRONG QA policies for its packages, I do not care if it doesnot provides the bleeding edge useless 3D-cube-rotating effects but I like it to WORK.
I wont update to 6.10, I wont make a clean install neither (as someone else said, if you have to reinstall your OS each time it is updated then it is broken); i do not have time to spend "working for my operating system" I need an operating system that lets me do my work.
The ubuntu setup I have let me do this at 70%, Microsoft Windows is not an option (that fuckers telling me my installation is pirated when it came in my HP NOTEBOOK). I have come to understand what a friend of mine said once when I asked "which OS do you preffer?" and he told me he did not like any of them. Oh well lets wait other 10 years, we might get to somewhere.
Is anyone here as frustrated as I am? or is it really too much to ask what I want?
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Wait, we can't use a wearable Turbine to go to mars? ::Takes off Turbine Hat:: Crap.
just an analog boy living in a digital age.
I'm glad that a lot of OSS developers don't have the same mindset as you. It sounds like you're saying, "Who the hell cares if Linux serves the needs of other people. As long as it serves my needs, everything else is wasted effort."
I've never seen it implied that you must. But if you want other people to use it, you're going to kinda have to make it easy enough for other people to use it. Maybe you're the type that doesn't care whether other people use your software or not. If so, then fine, write code that is as single-user (i.e. you) usable and obscure as you want, and don't sit around and scratch your head when you're the only one that uses it.
Fortunately, a lot of OSS developers have decided that as long as they're coding something that's useful to themselves, they might as well make it a little prettier so that it's usable (or even developable) to others as well, and eventually, we end up with software that grandma can use. Maybe you don't care, and if so, fine, don't care. But if you're the one who has to pay for grandma's copy of Windows just so she can send an e-mail, you start to appreciate all of the time and hard work those OSS developers have spent doing something that you're incapable of doing.
Wow, is that ever a gross misstatement. How pretty does pretty have to be before you consider it crossing the line from being "designed for experts to use" to being usable by "the average person"? What if the guy (or gal, or group) who wrote, oh I dunno, IDE disk drive drivers decided that he didn't need to simplify those gnarly function calls, and that every time you wanted to open a file on Linux, you had to make some low-level interrupt calls? I mean the fact that you can just call a function named something like open() was just a simplification to make your life easier, right? Wasn't it just a way of increasing that programming languages popular appeal? Does that mean that languages that implement an open() function are evil or just a waste of time?
I don't care how much of an expert you are, unless you're programming in assembler, you're standing on the shoulders of giants. And even if you are, you're probably still standing on the shoulders of a giant that wrote the editor you're using, the keyboard driver that's interpreting your keystrokes, the display driver that's showing you your code, and so on.
So yeah, I find it incredible arrogant to essentially say, "Hey, you all have programmed it well enough for me to use, so if you make it any easier for other people to use, you're really just wasting your time."
As for me, I'll gladly take whatever OSS developers give me in terms of ease of use, and I'll be extremely grateful for it, even if it's something I feel is pretty well developed already. And if grandma can use it too, all the better.
I'm sorry, I must have missed the memo that said that now that Linux is prettier, you can't still run it as a lean mean special-purpose machine. What compromises are you referring to? What exactly is it that you can't do now in Linux that you used to be able to? What nugget of "expert" functionality was it that was removed that had you all up in arms now? Last time I checked, I could get just as down and dirty with the low-level stuff as I always could. Yes, even in Ubuntu.
Unless you're planning on creating a new ideomatic language and teaching it to the rest of the world, we're kind of stuck with that whole letter-word-sentence-paragraph thing. Which gives rise to the idea of a page or document or file or folder that encapsulates a bunch of them.
Most sites or interfaces that try to overlay reality with other metaphors fail, usually because the metaphor doesn't communicate (why is the home page the "Town Hall"?) and because most graphical systems aren't as dense as text. To take your example, do I want to navigate a virtual building trying to find Fred's desk, or is it faster to find Fred in an alphabetic list and click on it.
I actually expect search and metadata (aka Spotlight) to take us further than 3D spinning virtual worlds...
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
For linux to catch on you really need to do away with all the tweaking of config files and all the config/make/make install.
:)
I speak as an ex linux fan who got tired of having to tweak a million things on every install so as to
- get the soundcard working (plod along forums XYZ to find out that you need a kernel recompile, what a joy)
- try one of 10 different hacks to get my logitech mediaplay to work under X (still haven't figured it out)
- upgrade kde to 3.5.5 in SuSE. You need a phd to sort out the dependencies (yes, that was recent history)
- be able to see & use the "network neighbourhood" (samba shares)
- have NTFS write support, anyone? For my external HDDs?
- etc. etc.
So after losing a couple of days at work (re)configuring my brand new linux pc, thinking I'll eventually get rid of the silly windoze environment again and get back to good-old linux, I got fed up.
So I stopped fiddling about, reassured myself that this is for people who've got time on their hands (like I used to when I was at uni), and popped a windows cd again. Took me 5 hours to get all my programs sorted and fully working (I do keep a fixed set of apps I install) along with all my hardware running smoothly.
The bottom line: Not everybody has the willingness/time to mother-hen an alternative OS. As much as I like linux, I'll stick to windows until a better time comes (I have time to waste or I don't need kernel recompilations). Things like gui slickness are details. Both KDE (my fav) and Gnome are doing really well on that aspect.
Or maybe I'm getting rusty. My real linux days finished with slackware (still my fav. distro) and suse about two years back, having used every single linux/unix distro there was, even irix/solaris (on SGI/Sun boxes
I'm no longer fed up with MS Windows: I go rid of them
Deep inside the Windows NT/XP kernel, it maintains an object namespace very similar to a Unix filesystem. You can use WinObj from sysinternals.com to navigate this object namespace. Notice that under the 'Global??' folder you will find the entries 'C:' and 'D:' and so on symbolic linked to the appropriate file system. Also, '\Device\*' in the object namespace is very much like '/dev/*' on Unix.
It is evident that drive letters under an NT kernel is just a DOS compatibility after-thought. The kernel doesn't have concepts of drive letters.
I once had a signature.
Yeah like I really like how in windows app where hitting OK sometimes closes the present window and sometimes opens the child window.
How about how if you open your browser, a single click on a hyperlink follows to the links URL, but the file-manager that looks just like the browser needs to double-click the links (shortcuts)?
Here's a good one how about downloading an executable to a user's desktop, then right-clicking and run-as admin, ever try that it don't work, Windows says admin has insufficient privileges! Then you get sneeky and down-load it to a shared folder, and run-as, but that still doesn't work, you have to copy it into the shared folder, I've pleaded with every windows guru for 3 years to tell me how to do that, nobody knew! as far as I can tell I'm the only one! This is so unintuitive, admin is untrusted and to make a file shared, it has to be moved into a shared folder, and downloading into the shared folder doesn't count!
I don't want to to things the "new" windows way, I want some sanity, I want the old tried and true, rational, expandable Unix way!
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
In your home directory sorted in whatever way makes sense to you - or on an NFS share used by a lot of people for collaborative work named after the project, division or whatever - not F: M: or whatever windows shared drive which may differ between desktop machines.
If you get something that isn't available with the distributions package manager it depends on what it is. Local stuff only to be used on that computer goes in /usr/local, optional stuff like java, openoffice and commercial software puts itself in /opt with it's own installer, stuff to be shared with other computers (which you probably won't be doing) goes in /usr/share. If it is stuff that only you will use it can also go in ~/bin to avoid having to install as root.
All distributions now look on the net for what you want and work out all dependencies. On Fedora "yum install packagename" or a GUI tool from the system menu, on Ubuntu and Debian "apt-get packagename" or a GUI tool from the system menu, on Mandriva a GUI tool from the system menu - Gentoo (not for newbies and it turns unix veterans into newbies again) "emerge packagename", and so on for other distributions - even package management on solaris. If the package is not on the list you can still get it, download it, read the instructions and install it - but you don't have to live on the cutting edge.
As for consistancy - it was called CDE - people liked choice more instead.
All that said - applications are the entire reason to use a computer, and if you have to learn to use a lot of different applications it may not be worth shifting to a different platform. You can get a lot of linux functionality with cygwin and ported versions of rsync, find, grep, awk, ssh, ImageMagik (batch processing of graphics files) etc. With X windows on your MS Windows machine you can use all linux applications on your screen with the actual programs running on a linux box you are networked to - that's how people with MS Windows at my workplace run interactive graphical software on a cluster.
In my workplace there were many people that just wanted to type reports and access remote machines - stability problems and MS Word formatting problems with embedded images drove them to linux. There are people that require specific applications that only run on MS Windows so they use Win2k or XP and X Windows. Linux is not MS Windows, has no registry (although g-conf is a misguided imitation done poorly and on a per user basis) has no C: drive and is different enough that your MSDOS specific knowlege will not apply - and the concept of doing everything with a GUI if difficult unless you are resticted to a few options or put incredible amounts of work in like apple. With a CLI you don't swear because the option you need to apply is greyed out because the developer didn't think of a paticular set of circumstances and then have to find and hack a text file anyway to get around it. A combination of CLI and GUI works well in a lot of circumstances and pipes let you do unexpected things quickly without having to buy/download a new program.
twice a year?
Some years ago somebody did a national survey to determine what the most popular/best font was. They discovered that in each city it was whatever the font of the major local newspaper was.
People usually prefer whatever it is they're used to and will rationalize any way they can to justify that choice. The Windows DayGlo look and the more traditional Linux look are just two more examples of that.
Personally, I dislike skinnability in general. If I can save a tenth of a second by having a conventional interface where I can find things quickly I'm all for it. Functional things are beautiful in themselves and for me eye candy doesn't even come close to competing.
---
Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
Second pipe on the left.