The Future of Linux on the Desktop?

I second the concerns about the dumbification of Linux as an inevitable consequence of desktop Linux advances. Most depressing is the sight of some essentially un-personalised, uncared for desktop with the same Start button in lower-left corner but a different icon on it.

What tends to be lost, on the way thither, is the notion that the end user and the admin ought to be two different virtual, so to speak, persons, even where they are one and the same person in the physical sense of the word.

Current proliferation of PC and non-PC hardware, platforms in general, is far from abating, contrary to what Intel might have wanted. Security issues won't go away either, and countless ways to lose money in a single click exist. I keep a ten-year worth of emails and a few G of other material I want to be preserved indefinitely, but hard drives fail, IDE interfaces disappear, and CDs get scratched and lost. Computing experience is being accumulated at a massive scale and rate, and yet computing (outside, in marketese, "check email and read news") is light years away from, say, end-user experience with cars.

Hence, I believe, computers must be managed by competent people, not "your grandmas", and it's just childish to insist happiness will prevail for all if computer maintenance is eventually made easy for the dull or otherwise uninterested.

From the end-user perspective, it's a totally different story. But here all has been well for quite a few years (since freetype, essentially). I manage my wife's oldish Latitude and IdeaPad, both under Gentoo, by taking the laptops offline for a night every three months, hand it back to her and forget until the next time around. The end-user is happy within her ~, and I make sure everything under / is operating normally, and that's the way it should be.