Which studies? Were other wm's such as Icewm, wmaker, ion3, etc included in this research?
Personally I believe a lot of people these days use the phrase "intuitive interface" when they really mean "You've seen this sort of thing before". Seems to me if you learned to use windows or mac you can learn to use most interfaces, including the fastest and most reliable one -- the CLI. Isn't the problem really one of wide scale illiteracy?
I use Debian myself, and when I started out (with Woody) many of the criticisms aimed at GNU/Linux were true (hard to get sound, hard to get the printer up, etc) and yet I persevered and learned to do it, with documentation and Google my only real support.
For those just migrating to Linux it is incredibly easy compared to just two years ago -- Debian Sarge has a real installer, Turboprint will get cups running, Bastille will walk you through the process of securing your system, etc. And if you're an unprivileged user on a system it makes virtually no difference which OS is used -- unless one has sustained organic brain damage since learning Win or Mac one can certainly learn any GNU desktop -- or the CLI for that matter.
Not everyone who uses GNU/Linux believes we are on a Mission From God to "beat windoze" and achieve world domination, lol. For thoses who do feel they are on such a mission your post makes perfect sense, but have you thought about what it *really* takes to make non-geeks switch? It would require automatic point-n-click for *everything*, which is precisely why windows is widely regarded as a broken OS out of the box security-wise.
The commercial linux desktop distros may well beat MS in the long run but most people will not be much better off because of it. They will continue to have the same problems they have today, because that is the price one pays for setting up an OS any non-computer person can learn to use in 10 minutes. Linux is a kernel, not a panacea and people who evangelise it as the solution to every problem are doing the linux "movement" no great favor by spreading these unreasonable expectations.
Just my opinion.:)
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Which studies? Were other wm's such as Icewm, wmaker, ion3, etc included in this research? Personally I believe a lot of people these days use the phrase "intuitive interface" when they really mean "You've seen this sort of thing before". Seems to me if you learned to use windows or mac you can learn to use most interfaces, including the fastest and most reliable one -- the CLI. Isn't the problem really one of wide scale illiteracy? I use Debian myself, and when I started out (with Woody) many of the criticisms aimed at GNU/Linux were true (hard to get sound, hard to get the printer up, etc) and yet I persevered and learned to do it, with documentation and Google my only real support. For those just migrating to Linux it is incredibly easy compared to just two years ago -- Debian Sarge has a real installer, Turboprint will get cups running, Bastille will walk you through the process of securing your system, etc. And if you're an unprivileged user on a system it makes virtually no difference which OS is used -- unless one has sustained organic brain damage since learning Win or Mac one can certainly learn any GNU desktop -- or the CLI for that matter.
Not everyone who uses GNU/Linux believes we are on a Mission From God to "beat windoze" and achieve world domination, lol. For thoses who do feel they are on such a mission your post makes perfect sense, but have you thought about what it *really* takes to make non-geeks switch? It would require automatic point-n-click for *everything*, which is precisely why windows is widely regarded as a broken OS out of the box security-wise. The commercial linux desktop distros may well beat MS in the long run but most people will not be much better off because of it. They will continue to have the same problems they have today, because that is the price one pays for setting up an OS any non-computer person can learn to use in 10 minutes. Linux is a kernel, not a panacea and people who evangelise it as the solution to every problem are doing the linux "movement" no great favor by spreading these unreasonable expectations. Just my opinion. :)