I work as a software developer for a small e-commerce firm, named after a large river. The most common use case for me, is to have my laptop docked to a larger screen, where I have some applications running on my laptop screen, this could be a browser window on a laptop screen, e-mail client etc., and have my ssh windows open on the bigger screen, since code is more important to me, it gets the larger screen real estate. Linux, (maybe not Unity) but KDE, SUCKS MY BALLS for this. This is the most common use case for EVERYONE working in my company, and Linux is completely unusable for this. 1. lightdm, the display manager, will not understand the desktop monitor settings. 2. The extended desktop setting is broken. On the OPEN SOURCE, Intel driver. Just in case someone started bitching about drivers. 3. If you force it into your required setting, with the bigger screen as your main display, and the smaller screen as extended to it's side, the brilliance that Linux is, will show a blank screen if you aren't connected. Basically, if you are connected things can be OK for one big screen, if you are not, it will still try to push display to the bigger screen, even when you ARE NOT connected. I have many more grievances against extended displays on Linux, but I will stop here. Basically, Linux on multi monitor set ups, is a non-starter. Note : I might have used Linux as a stand-in for KDE, so this might just be a rant about KDE, but I tried XFCE on my home laptop. The out-of-box experience is so 90's that it beggars belief. Win7, it pains me to say, is smooth as butter on this. Every imaginable configuration, is done as intuitively as possible. The Win+P shortcut brings up an easy mode switching popup. The advanced configuration screen under Screen Resolution, is super easy to figure out as well. Also, the grand-grand-parent poster, is absolutely wrong about the Window Manger being linked with the application in Windows. From Vista, Windows has had a compositing manager, no dirty rectangles, tearing the screen because of one misbehaving application. Yes, I understand the reasons for why Linux/KDE isn't able to do this, lack of vertical integration, no driver support, blah blah, but really, how can I evangelize about Linux, if it cannot do something as simple as extending displays correctly and easily?

With all due respects to the geeks and nerds in the /. community, I do not think Ubuntu or any other distro will ever achieve the popularity their ease of use deserve, simply because they are too damn difficult to install. The install process is extremely smooth, but until the process of creating the ext3/4 partitions is eased up/ automated / GUIed, no linux distro ever will achieve the popularity that we want them to. It was only yesterday when I was installing Natty on a fellow computer science Master's student's laptop that it truly struck me how messed up that process is. First the install had to be aborted and gparted had to be started. Then since there were four primary partitions which came with the manufacturer (HP), we had to remove one, and then find that gparted had problem reading the 250 GB main partition which we wanted to split. So chkdsk /f was run on that which took about an hour. After all this we managed to create the partition and install it. It is truly amazing that this problem is never given its due importance. Using GPartEd itself is not too easy for a newbie, hell its f***king hard. Add to that the chances of the great disasters waiting to happen on a wrong format/partition creating going wrong, its a miracle there are so many people who actually use GNU/Linux at all!