[trotsky]

Making Linux usable by the “general public” was eschewed by the Linux community for years.

I've been part of the linux community since 1994, and I have never once heard anyone express a desire to prevent mainstream adoption. Quite the contrary - many, many people have been strident evangelists over the years (to the point that it could be quite annoying; whatever the question the answer was linux) and many, many people have spent large amounts of time coding tools and programs to make it more accessible. The problem hasn't been a lack of desire, it's been that it's been quite hard - the open source model of scratch your own itch doesn't lend itself particularly well to the level of polish that's needed.

[cs702]

I agree -- the Linux community, on the whole, has always wanted mainstream adoption. Annual "year of desktop Linux" proclamations going back to the mid-90's attest to it!

The challenge, IMO, is that adding polish to a general-use desktop is really really hard -- it requires design talent, cannot easily be done by committee, and takes a long time. Think years of design and constant redesign, lots of tweaking (down to individual pixels!), never-ending usability testing, and iterative writing, discarding, and re-writing of UI code.

While some in the Linux community have long had the design know-how and experience necessary to make Linux usable by Aunt Tillie, until very recently no one had the long-term commitment, financial resources, managerial skill, and staying power necessary to pull it off.

Canonical brings not just design talent, but also long-term commitment, financial resources, managerial skill, and staying power to the table; they have the best shot at making Linux a mainstream desktop OS.

[ ADDENDUM: Google also has an equally good shot with ChromeOS. ]

[freehunter]

From being in the Linux world for about a decade now, most feature requests I've had for making the desktop more usable have been met with "just run this in the terminal" followed by me blindly running the command with no knowledge of what it did. That's antithetical of Linux on the desktop.

Now Canonical is making Linux more accessible, and people are throwing an outrage over changing parts of the Linux experience that desperately needed to be changed for desktop users.