I use Debian with KDE every day (it still doesn't work right, I never got it to function with DHCP, I have to give it a fixed IP every time), Messed about a bit with Knoppix fairly recently, and tried that gOS distro just yesterday. I haven't installed a full Ubuntu distro lately. Perhaps I'll do that just to satisfy your (and my) curiosity. I'll report my experiences with Ubuntu here when I'm done.



I'm talking from experience, not parroting a party line. Every time I touch a Linux desktop, I'm painfully reminded of just how much I would *not* want to use it as my daily driver. And that's *me*, a techie. The idea of a non-techie having to do the same makes me shudder. Here's another example:

I wanted to look up which base distro and build number the gOS thing uses, and accidentally opened up an applet caled "About Me", hoping it would give me info about the operating system. It gave me an error: "There was an error while trying to get the addressbook information Evolution Data Server can't handle the protocol" (bad punctuation was in the error message itself).

That's from a fresh installation of the OS. All I did was install the OS from scratch, open up its program menu, and pick an innocent-looking icon. I'm presented with a cryptic, poorly-worded error message with no hint of how to solve the problem. As a techie type, I can look past the bad English and get a vague idea of what might be wrong, but I still have no clue how to fix something like that.

That's just flat-out a Quality Assurance problem. Microsoft and Apple's OS's might have their issues, but their out of box experience from a fresh install is better than that.