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Seems a bit faster ...
Are they also updating the Netbook Remix?
How about USB wireless adapter support?
I love to read these breathless reports of a “user-friendly Linux”....
We’ve been reading them since, what, the last 10 years?
Here’s the problem: Good GUI design is *hard*. It takes a lot of thought about how people use computers. Most of the people who are involved in Linux development don’t have the time to think hard for a long time.
The way Apple got a clean UI was that they had a UI guy known as “The Tog” (aka Bruce Tognazzini) who would ride herd on app developers. In the very early days of Mac development, if you put out an app on the Mac that had a goofy UI, you might get a call from The Tog, offering to help you smooth it out. It worked, because after awhile, the critical mass of apps that did things “the correct way” became established, which pretty much gave new app developers a big body of examples of how to handle various things.
Linux has no such UI visionary - so you have a bunch of people all riding off in different directions, with X11 and a toolkit in hand. X11 for UI is already bad enough, but without a single look-n-feel for the UI... it will take half of forever to arrive at a truly “user friendly Linux.”
My son hasn’t used Windows in 5 years. I used Windows 7 Ultimate, but still have to go to him when I need videos converted quickly (simple command line expression) to Flash and other seemingly mundane tasks that take forever in Windows.
I think the main hurdle is still application support. Installing Ubuntu on a brand-name PC today is as painless as one can expect. And the GUI may not be as shiny and nice as OSX or Windows but it’s clean, functional and easy enough for the non-power user while at the same time being the premier OS of choice for developers. But in my opinion, the Linux alternatives to Word and Excel just aren’t close. And until you have main-stream support for gaming, you’ll never get it onto high-end home-PCs.