OSNews

It's a pity he chose Ubuntu which isn't a very polished distribution. SUSE 10 would have been a closer comparison, not least because of the tools in YaST designed to make fitting into a network easy - Samba, firewall, mail, authentication, etc. I don't how SUSE tweak their fonts, but they seem to manage anti-aliasing non-native fonts a lot better than the Ubuntu/Debian methods. The MS TT fonts display too poorly here on Debian to be usable but they look full and rich on OpenSUSE 10. Anyone know the reason?

There are quite a lot of little warnings in this article, too. Evolution was less than stellar. Open Office 2 works well but only if your needs are decidedly simple and you don't need MS Access-type stuff. Some of the configuration he had to set up would have floored anyone who was not familiar with Linux and a bit of a techie.

So from the sound of it Linux is nearly there but still needs quite a lot of scrubbing and polishing before it's really OK for Joe User as distinct from those who already know what they're doing. Anyway, it's good to see the challenge laid out: for distros, this appears to mean less posturing and BS, more elbow grease on getting what they already have to work better, and more effort to remember that Joe User isn't going to know what things like Samba or IMAP are, let alone how to use them.