[eropple]

It doesn't need to be "friendly," but if it's not going to be such, pushing it on normal people who don't know any better is probably a bad idea.

That said, friendliness is not incompatible with "hacker-friendly."

[j_baker]

I agree on both counts. I find Ubuntu to be a good mix of hacker-friendliness and user-friendliness.

What I'm getting at is that everyone seems to think Linux has to succeed on the desktop. Perhaps that was a good goal in the Windows XP days, but it's not as big a deal now.

I don't see why Linux needs to be a mainstream OS.