I concede, my information was based on my impression from a few years ago. I just checked my latest Fedora install and noticed that their default menus have dropped the names of the actual applications entirely, instead just saying "Spreadsheets", "Video Player" and the like.

I was just remember my earlier Ubuntu installs which (and maybe my memory is wrong) presented me with menus containing things like "File Roller", "Pidgin", etc. whereas a fresh install of Windows comes with fairly simple but clearly titled applications like "Paint", "Internet Explorer", "Notepad". You get the idea. But it looks like that area has been addressed by at least the most popular distributions so kudos!

Your point is certainly valid and I admit that I didn't put enough thought into it before I wrote. Though you do admit that the names we see in Windows are much more familiar to us as many of them have been around almost as long as Windows has. Though I have to think that there is plenty of room for improvement both to icons and names to help linux adopters along. SOME distributions do add the extra description to the menu items. I seem to recall Mandrake used to do that with their KDE menus back in the day (using the optional program description field so that they could be turned off once you were familiar with them).

I guess I'm just stuck in a wishful thinking pattern of saying, if you're willing to concede that Amarok is to be officially bundled with KDE, then can't we just rename it to KDE Media Player so I'm not left wondering what a blue fox icon will do when I click it and people don't laugh at me when I pronounce it wrong ;-)

As a side note, I personally don't suffer from these problems cause I've been around for a while, since RedHat 6 or thereabouts. I believe that GAIM made more sense than Pidgin since it at least retained a common Windows name inside of its own.

The problem is that by and large the "search" functions of package managers are completely useless. Suppose I'm searching for an instant messenger client. Coming from a Windows machine I'd use my "tech saviness" to search for "im" or maybe "im client". The result (performed using yum search on a fedora machine) returns 4523 programs. I'll give you an example entry:

"ftplib.i386 : Library of FTP routines"

That's odd, I searched on "im client" and it returned an ftp library, along with 4500 other useless entries and are seemingly unrelated to my search. It turns out it does that cause it breaks my two words up into two separate searches so it was actually "client" that returned the ftp result, even though "client" doesn't appear in the package name or short description.

  Now I know that I really want to install pidgin but what on earth would I ever search for that would return that? It turns out that even searching on the quoted string "instant messenger" won't return pidgin because the description uses the term "messenging". Sigh.

What bothers me about this situation is exactly what the author says in the article, recommending that people don't install updates for packages they don't recognize. So a major security hole gets patched in X11/whatever and the end-user reads this article and says, "shit, I don't know what the hell X11 is so I better not let it install that on my computer".

I completely agree with you that the drag-to-applications install method was completely foreign to me when I got my first Mac. That being said, after using it for two years I'm sold that it's got to be the best application install paradigm out there. When it comes time to remove the application, I know exactly what needs to be deleted. I don't need to worry about one file getting corrupt and the uninstall application failing to ever remove the entire program, etc.

Except that even the windows steps start with something familiar, My Computer. Maybe even My Documents. Or if you want to get extremely advanced, open Windows Explorer. The big problem for me when it comes to Linux always has been that people choose the most absurd names when writing their applications. If I'm looking through an application repository how am I (assuming for the moment that I was a novice) supposed to know that Pidgin is an IM client? Why should I believe that GIMP is an image program? I mean, it's not like it advertises itself ala "Photoshop". OpenOffice is about the best example that the free community has to offer when it comes to application naming. I'm surprised Firefox got as far as it did and probably wouldn't have if it wasn't coming from Mozilla's shop. But I don't care who you are, when you're browsing through the default menus on a Linux distro you better be completely uninspired to open Konqueror to browse your file system.

Haha, yeah, that key. Well in all fairness I didn't jump on board til the post Intel days, so maybe those keys came with the x86 territory (you know, since they advertised you could run Windows on the computer as well, might as well have all the keys).

Actually ... I'm using my 'Mac' keyboard right now and the lower left key is clearly labeled "control" and the key to its right is co-labeled "alt" and "option". So it is acceptable, and indeed appropriate, to refer to those keys as "Alt" and "Ctrl" when using a Mac as well.

Or C) bought cheap memory.

Wow, you're so off base it's not even funny. Nevermind that your command on linux has no bearing on how the system announces itself to the network, doesn't affect WINS servers, etc. While it seems trivial at the outset, Windows uses the computers name for a lot more things than an internal DNS reference so the user can ping him/herself. That being said, it would seem to me that Windows could do a simple service restart as opposed to a full reboot.

Considering that almost every time I run YUM there's a new kernel update I'm not sure that this is entirely accurate. While I do think there are things that Windows is ridiculous for wanting me to reboot for, Linux is getting worse faster than it's getting better. When I was running Ubuntu it seemed like every update wanted to restart.

It's probably a reasonable assumption that at least 98.5% of the population is unfit to post articles on Wikipedia so that 98.3 number is meaningless.

I agree with most, if not all, of the proposed changes to the notification system. I agree, for example, that notifications are just "extra information" if you happen to be present and shouldn't require interaction. However, that's not to say that I don't think it would be convenient to have a gesture/keystroke shortcut that causes a predetermined interaction with a notification type. For instance, it would be convenient for me if there was a short snippet about each incoming email, displayed in a notification, as opposed to "1 new message". That way I could know if the email was worth checking or not. If it was, it'd be nice, at the time of notification, to hit a key combo or something that took me straight to mail to see the new content. While I think that's a great idea, I have no idea on how to implement it in such a way that doesn't negatively affect other users.

I think one of the longest standing problems with Linux is the tray / notification area. Too many competing methods, sloppy looking icons, and inconsistencies that create a negative experience for the user.