Come on you guys... What seems to have been shown here is Sun's CDE desktop, from Solaris 2.5
I don't know what the latest incarnations look like though..
It's all about the right tool for the job. Many Unix apps are used over an SSH session anyway - so you don't have a desktop environment at all. For example, I have some friends at Uni that use a molecular simulatory thingy called "SPARTAN" over an ssh tunnel to a 64 node SGI origin 2000 - VERY hardcore - The app simply runs under your local window manager, whether it be X-Win32 for windows or something else. I've used an ASIC (IC design) CAD tool over ssh to some Sun Enterprise 4x sparc cpu systems. I have friends that use Anjuta for C/C++ coding over ssh to my own linux machines (since they are windows users, have to use gcc, and like the Anjuta IDE) You don't have to use the desktop environment on any of these things, just the app.
Have you considered that the window managers you see that appear crude and uninviting just require some effort by the user. A lot of Unix apps are not intuitive - you have to read the manuals - but when you read the documentation you understand that it is not INTENTIONALY made to be a &^#^ to use, there are good reasons for some of the "obscurity", usually it's actually logical, in general these things improve your productivity compared to the traditional mousy "right-click" or "pull-down menu" philosophy.
It's just that it requires your brain to get out of the windows mould and try something different...
But I will say this: it's usually more convenient for me to use a shell to start programs than go through a start menu. I have shells open permenantly for this purpose. Obviously if you are afraid of a CLI shell then owning your own unix machine that you have to admister for yourself just isn't for you - since the CLI is where most of the power is. Especially grep, sed, awk, bash scripting and perl
However I believe that the average joe windows user can get around in a suitably setup KDE/gnome GUI on Linux ok - I gave a person an X11 session to my computer when their windows refused to boot (I got them to boot off a knoppix CD to runlevel 2, setup network, then use X -query ) so they could use openoffice/mozilla for an urgent assignment and they handled it fine.
- Paul
