Despite its issues (and it has them), Ubuntu is by far the most usable Linux variety, both on the desktop and server...
One issue I really hope gets sorted before 14.04 is the LibreOffice menu bug
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libreoffice/+bug/7...
That is definitely under the 'fit and finish' heading! Imagine a future version of Ubuntu with Unity with that bug landing on the desktops of a few thousand users doing office work...
Do you think Jobs would have allowed a MacOs X update to badly break the way MS Office worked?
Yes, for consistency with my original reply, I should have said Apple!
Unless you want some console-only LFS. But that's not me.
(My gentoo experience may be somewhat out of date)
Corporate use: Ubuntu desktop can be deployed in various ways automatically. Canonical will sell configuration systems as well. There was at one point a desktop image available for corporate use that has the social and media integration removed. Not sure about gentoo in that area (if anyone has supported a large scale gentoo installation for end users, let us know!). I would imagine people would be looking more at CentOS or openSuse.
and this right here (sorry Parent, just using this as an example) is the reason that Linux has always been consigned to the ranks of the also-rans on the desktop. Someone will always come up with a reason why flavour x is better than flavour y. No matter what aspect of Linux is discussed, there will always be a significant proportion of users that think their flavour is better.
If you care about Linux on the desktop, you have got to see that people like Mark Shuttleworth are absolutely essential if Linux is ever to compete meaningfully on the desktop with Microsoft and Apple.
I think I detect a hint of sarcasm
No it isn't. The number of people who don't use Linux on their desktop, simply because someone else commented on a forum that they preferred one distribution over another, is utterly negligible. In fact, the theory is just ludicrous!
* Made up number but I remember Acer shipping netbooks with Linpus Lite...
However, I knew that Linux ran on it out of the box, and that meant I could run Slackware without worrying about missing drivers, etc. Also, it was a great way to support a company that supports free software.
To me, a company that sells pre-installed Linux on decent hardware has my admiration and support, regardless of the distro.
They lose exactly 0% of Windows market by offering another option in Operating System (in fact, I tend to avoid hardware that only does Windows as it tends to be crap, so it might actually be a gain).
If you remember people bitching about Linpus Lite because it wasn't people's favourite distro, you remember wrong.
Otherwise (1) you're being illogical and (2) my memory is accurate.
Sadly we're missing "something else" other than Mark Shuttleworth.
What he does, is what most others are doing in a half-hearted, compromised way: providing a "packaged" system that works without much hassle and which is based in pretty much the same interaction principles of the 70s and 80s.
Being Open Source, Linux could do a lot more than that. But nobody explores these avenues, it just aspires to be Windows/OS2/Mac in the desktop and Unix in the server. Linux could exploit the fact that it doesn't need to hide its workings, that it can allow any level of customisation in the workflow, in the windows manager, in permission management, etc etc because the user owns the software running in his or her computer. This basically has been exploited just for virtualisation.
The problem with that is monetisation. But a lot of development in the Linux community is non-for-profit anyway.
Also http://awesome.naquadah.org/ and https://code.google.com/p/wmii/
And that's just windows management which is probably the most obvious advantage of an all-open approach, but there are other things like user programmed priority systems, memory management etc which could potentially do a much more effective usage of the hardware than the standard monolithic opaque approach.
Shuttleworth has also been active in educational projects especially in South Africa.