I’m calling it: Ubuntu is finally ready for the world.

Absolutely, on any system. I'll admit I swear every now and again when I get caught trying to run apt-get with synaptic open on another workspace.

>You will notice I said "it has to be better than 'better than Windows'", because "better than Windows" still means "learning something other than Windows".

I agree. I guess I'm guilty of accepting a limitation because it's commonplace. I assume overcoming that limitation on Ubuntu/any system using apt would be extremely technically challenging and given the few times it occurs it's not a priority.

I probably agree with a lot of your other assertions, but this seems to miss one of the central purposes of a repository-based package manager system.

Security may not be a very high priority at this moment for novice users of Linux distributions, but it will swiftly become one as Ubuntu continues to gain popularity. The old paradigm you're describing - download a solitary binary, double-click to install it across the system - is a huge security hole that Microsoft (for instance) has spent and will spend billions of dollars to patch around; the vast majority of exploits on Windows machines seem to be based on the fact that an unsuspecting user can easily download and run code that is swiftly given root access to their whole machine.

The repository system - a system where the set of programs available for easy download and installation is carefully managed and maintained - is an idea that was decades ahead of its time, and it's only just now that repositories (and their children, "app stores") are becoming a fact of life on lots of platforms. App stores are useful because they make things easier for users, but they're also extremely beneficial from a security standpoint. They also offer a simple, obvious, secure way for individual applications to be updated and patched when necessary.

tl;dr - Novice users should be strongly discouraged from downloading and installing standalone programs. This is not a feature of Windows; it's a bug. Yes, there are lots of essential Linux programs that are not available easily on the Ubuntu Software Center. The solution to that problem is to improve the repositories by adding them. Making it easier for novice users to run downloaded code blindly would be a mistake.

Unfortunately, I'm having the same experience on my desktop. Unity didn't fit the way I prefer to work (and yeah, I tried it for a while, I didn't just dismiss it without some effort), and I switched to KDE. Holy slowness, Batman...my Windows 7 desktop becomes usable much faster (on the same machine) than the Kubuntu desktop. Applications sometimes take forever to start, with no rhyme or reason. I haven't chosen to explicitly install anything new--I just have the same basic boring dev and scientific computing packages I've always had.

And yes, Ubuntu used to feel like it was usable "out of the box" one major version ago. Then they started adding bells and whistles, and since then it's just been a steady degradation in performance.

Sure, I can probably go fiddle with a bunch of settings somewhere, but as soon as I have some downtime I'm going to try out some other distros that--hopefully--don't feel the need to add a bunch of performance-sucking features by default.

The challenge, IMO, is that adding polish to a general-use desktop is really really hard -- it requires design talent, cannot easily be done by committee, and takes a long time. Think years of design and constant redesign, lots of tweaking (down to individual pixels!), never-ending usability testing, and iterative writing, discarding, and re-writing of UI code.

While some in the Linux community have long had the design know-how and experience necessary to make Linux usable by Aunt Tillie, until very recently no one had the long-term commitment, financial resources, managerial skill, and staying power necessary to pull it off.

Canonical brings not just design talent, but also long-term commitment, financial resources, managerial skill, and staying power to the table; they have the best shot at making Linux a mainstream desktop OS.

[ ADDENDUM: Google also has an equally good shot with ChromeOS. ]

Another problem you did not mention is tearing during video playback. Desktop computers are heavily used for watching video, so until Wayland hopefully fixes this Linux won't be a great desktop replacement.