Disagreed, because what Linux savvy people often forget (due to a certain egocentrism, no offense) is the fact, that most people aren't spending as much time in front of a PC and may have completely different priorities and hobbies.I disagree.
I find the very idea of making a system "beginner friendly" (whatever that means) a flawed concept. There is nothing wrong with being a beginner, but the beginner should have the ambition to become sufficently advanced. There is nothing wrong with taking him by the hand but he should walk on his own feet. This means, the system shouldn't be dumbed-down. Instead the beginner should learn how to use it properly. And properly using a unixoid system means to get familiar with shells.
As an example: I'm an artisan that likes making music (accoustic), reading books, watching movies and playing video games, but I also dislike DRM and spyware, so a user friendly experience is still important for me and as soon as one needs to use the terminal, something isn't user friendly anymore. I only use the terminal if I absolutely have to since I already have to learn so many things in my life which have nothing to do with computers at all, which is why I like Synaptic so much.
By now I know my way around in a user friendly Linux system and that's about it but most people wouldn't even understand what is being talked about here at all.
I like you guys and computer science can be a lot of fun, but sometimes trying to see through an entirely different perspective would help.
In order to drive a car, you only need to learn how to drive it but not how to disassemble, repair, modify and reassemble it again although it's always great to really know your stuff if you have the time.After all, people are born illiterate, but we don't design our society to work without text - we teach children how to read. Nobody starts as a good car driver, but instead of making our streets look like bumper car courts we have people go through driving schools.
Like cars in many areas, computers are a necessity for everyone by now so this is actually a good comparison imho.
BTW: I don't expect every musician to be able to build the instrument he is playing just because I can.
That said, I think the Pandora did a great job in being user friendly while still being versatile, it literally made me use Linux everywhere by now.
Making Linux more open to the world will make the world more open towards Linux.
Things only go downhill if you lock something down and prevent modifications but this hasn't much to do with user friendlyness.
In the end you must ask yourself what you really want.
Do you want Linux to be exclusive to a small elite or do you want to see less Windoze around in general, because you won't make an army of computer scientists out of everybody.
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