I don't think cs702 is saying that. I'm guessing that he means it's like learning something completely different. My parents and my in-laws already had a ton of grief with changing from Office 2003 to Ribbon, when it came out; They also had trouble with XP -> 7. When they use my wife's MBP, they also have trouble. I'm pretty sure it's not going to be easy for them to use 8.

Change is good. Has to happen sometime. Can be difficult to get used to but thats not a reason to avoid change, just to think about how to smooth transitions.

No, but they should follow the GNU/Linux model of desktop UIs: have them be a seperate program and allow the user to choose which one (s)he wants to log into, and allow the user to install one from a third party, as apposed to having it be an irreplacable part of the OS.

I believe (weakly) that OS X treats window managers the same way Linux does.

> No, but they should follow the GNU/Linux model of desktop UIs

Not to completely dismiss this but … have you noticed how much extra burden this places on developers and how this is almost always cited as one of the reasons why the OSS desktop experience isn't as good as OS X? There are many parts of the desktop experience which require more than cursory integration and that becomes a much harder problem to make generic and plugable.

> There are many parts of the desktop experience which require more than cursory integration and that becomes a much harder problem to make generic and plugable.

Do you mind mentioning some examples. My desktop runs Awesome, but I make extensive use of Gnome widgets and programs. The fact that these work out of the box without issue, despite the fact that they were developed to be part of the Gnome desktop, seems to suggest that the standards work fine.

Besides, thinking back to when I used Windows, I cannot think of an application/desktop integration that does not work on Linux.

I always imagined that OS X had a "better" experience because it had teams of developers whose job it was to make it have a better experience for the user. Also, never liked the OS X experience, icons don't automatically un-clutter in folders, it is difficult to tell the difference between what is and isn't running, and I still cannot figure out how to reliably rename a file without using the terminal.