On a positive note, Microsoft can't possibly do worse than what's going on in Linux land as far as desktop environments go.
The stuff major distros are pushing out is bizarre. I setup Fedora 16 on a machine about a week ago. Out of the box the "desktop" has no icons. It literally does nothing. Minimize and maximize buttons are gone from all windows in all applications and there is no analog of the "dock" or "task bar". I feel that UI designers have forgotten that many of use actually use computers to do real work.
(Fedora 16 is pretty nice though once you grab gnome-tweak-tool and use it to set nautilus to handle the desktop and re-enable the window gadgets. Sadly I still have to use xrandr from the CLI to init my second monitor, and the Gnome 3 UI metaphor doesn't really work well with dual monitor setups. I have an ATI 5770 card, but the ATI graphics drivers don't work well with any recent linux distro I've tried, so I'm stuck with Gallium and OpenGL 2.1 support, :mad: )
