[darklajid]

1) ~Maybe~. In absolutes, I agree. I don't think it matters much though.

2) Sticking with Windows comparisons: Moving from 98 to XP was different in quite some ways, to Vista and beyond was another change in lots of things.

We agree that choice is good. We disagree about whether there's too much choice right now. I see only two technical choices, KDE or Gnome, with the Gnome-Shell/Unity variants for the latter. No idea if this fork will prevail and be part of the list in the future.

The average user, the "grandma" that often comes up during these discussions, doesn't care. My gut feeling says that she'll end up with Ubuntu or Kubuntu installed (Maybe Mint. Maybe Fedora) and use what is available.

And quite frankly, what _is_ available is ready for every casual/average home user, in my opinion.

[keithpeter]

Agreed. If "grandma" were to choose Ubuntu, she would have a good quality 140 page manual ready to download and dip into. See the Ubuntu-Manual project on launchpad for the Unity version (currently at alpha).

https://lists.launchpad.net/ubuntu-manual/msg02859.html

Is there a comparable tome ready for Gnome Shell based workflows? I'd really like to find one.

[bkor]

http://library.gnome.org/, also included in GNOME 3.

[keithpeter]

Looks good, somewhere between

https://help.ubuntu.com/11.10/ubuntu-help/index.html

and the paper manual. I especially like the keyboard hints embedded as they go along.

[TylerE]

Users don't read manuals. If you expect the user to read the manual to use your product, you have failed.