Every single person I knew who owned a land rover is nowadays a mechanic (even some who switched from software). That to me is enough of a reason to not even consider buying a land rover should I need a new vehicle. I don't want to be a mechanic, I would much rather spend my time on things that interest me. Now I know my way around a computer, I work as a programmer in fact. But if I don't want to be a mechanic, it's not hard for me to understand why my mom doesn't want to become a pc tech. "You have to be a mechanic to drive me. Piss off, I don't need to be a mechanic to drive other cars" "you just need to get a little bit tech savvy to use me. Piss off, I don't need to get a little bit tech savvy to use windows or mac" This is how the average Joe thinks when it comes to this thing. We are not "average joes" given that we feel strongly enough about the subject to be commenting about it here. But if linux on the desktop wants to ever "win" it's the hearts and minds of the average joes that it needs to win. And unfortunately the average joe is not even considered.

Well we don't need a single choice. We can still have every single thing customizable. But we also have to agree that the average user does not want to customize anything, they just want to sit at a computer and do their thing. So how about everyone agrees on a standard default for everything? Make sure the user can install other things on the system to replace the defaults, but for a desktop system those defaults should be always available and easily accessible. So if I, who has been tinkering with pcs for literally as far back as I can remember, customize the crap out of my machine, I can still loan my machine to my mum and she could use it, just because there would always be something she's familiar with available.