Either you are exaggerating greatly or your experience as an MCSE is actually harming your ability to learn Win 8. Windows 8 desktop-mode is an evolution from Win 7. The new UI is obnoxious, but there is nothing complex about it. For the lay person, Windows 8 will work out of the box, and they'll be able to buy everything they need from the app store (which is also a seamless experience). In the worst case, you face the minor annoyance of switching to desktop mode to get a similar experience to Win 7, which of course was well-regarded by users. Let's compare this to my experience last week loading Ubuntu 12.04 on my Lenovo laptop. Installation was seamless and the wireless connection was easy to set up. Then, after install, the OS asked to download some updates. Boom. Broken wireless. The solution? Just figure out the exact model of my wireless adapter, download the appropriate drivers on a different machine (a wired connection was not available), load them into Linux, then block the OS from making changes to this driver. Luckily, this issue was easy to locate a solution for, because it has affected many users of the same (Broadcom) wireless adapter and has been an issue for years. The last time Windows Update rendered my machine useless? Never (and really, WU hasn't caused significant issues for users on a wide scale for nearly a decade since the infamous XP service pack issues). I hope and pray Windows never becomes as "user-friendly" as any Linux flavor I've ever encountered. Give me Linux on my server and my development box, and give me Windows on my recreation box. Both are fine, but Linux really isn't anywhere close to unseating MS in the usability space; I don't think the high incidence of Asperger's in the techie crowd and the high incidence of techies who think Linux is as usable as Windows is any sort of coincidence.