[stinos]

yes there are such environments. Never denied that. But as I said, I consider them only perfectly usable for computer savvy users who are able to fix what they break and configure what they buy and spend time on it. That last part kills it for me.

[vertex-four]

Honestly, as a current Debian Wheezy user... this isn't true any more. I haven't had to fix anything since I installed it. It's all Just Worked.

If it didn't just work, I'd've bought a Windows license, as I have previously done. This is, in fact, the first Linux install that I've continued using for over a couple of months.

The "it's not very usable" argument was correct in the old GNOME2/KDE3 world, but at least GNOME3 is exceptionally usable and the OS is extremely stable.

[stinos]

It's probably better than it used to be. But it just keeps on coming back to me. Like last month I downloaded a live CD of the latest Debian because I coulnd't find the one I normally use, and it didn't even want to start X. Not on an old pc with a recent graphics card, not on a new one with another recent graphics card. Not generalizing this to everything and maybe I just have bad luck but things like that are an unfortunately large part of my experience with desktop linux.

[davexunit]

I haven't used a live CD of Debian, but you should know that since Debian Squeeze, nonfree graphics drivers are not included. Perhaps that was an issue? If you want something that "just works", use a Debian derivative like Ubuntu. Debian is great and I use it on a few of my machines because I can install a minimal set of packages and build on top of it.

[mikevm]

> It's all Just Worked.

Try making the fonts pretty on non-Ubuntu distros. Good luck making it "just work".

[davexunit]

I have never noticed what people have been complaining about regarding fonts. Ubuntu uses some freetype patches that have not been accepted upstream, right? The fonts look just fine to me. It's a very minor gripe at best.

[davexunit]

And you would be wrong. GNOME 3, Cinnamon, Unity, etc. are all made for "regular people" to use and they work just fine when I have used them. I think you are perpetuating a popular myth that GNU/Linux desktop environments are only for so called "power users" and programmers.

[ctb_mg]

FWIW, they did give a valid use case and a valid issue in their initial post -- regarding configuration of distro vs. desktop environment. However, I don't know how valid that problem is in many Linux desktop environments today. There have been leaps and bounds in terms of usability and smoothing out the user experiences on Linux desktop environments lately.