Rick Moen <rick@???> wrote:

> Honestly, who the Gehenna needs a Desktop Environment? Because it
> bundles a graphical file shell? If you want one of those, install
> whichever one you like best on an a la carte basis. The whole DE
> concept lacks a compelling justification, IMO.

Ah, now that opens up a whole new debate ...
The answer is, that it depends on the skill level of the user.

For a technically minded person, like a lot of us here, then you are correct - simple is good, we can use "point tools" for specific tasks. nd we have the ability and inclination to learn how to use them

In a business world, my experience is that for a lot of users, you can throw a fairly "unfriendly" interface at them, and provide their tasks are well bounded and sufficient training given, then most users can pick things up fairly quickly.
I'm thinking in particular of the ERP system we ran at our last place, running on "green screens" and solely keyboard driven. While not the sort of thing you could throw a novice at and leave them to figure it out, it was fast, precise, and especially in places like the warehouse they could fly through things - as in, they quickly learn that it takes "n presses of the enter key" to get from one field they have to enter things in, to the next, skipping the fields in between that they don't normally use. Especially, none of this "use the mouse to get to one place, then put hands to keyboard to enter data, then go back to mouse, then back to keyboard, ..."

But for, I'd say, the vast majority of users - neither of those is true. I'd suggest that the majority of computer users have no training as such - perhaps just a friend showing them how to get started or how to do a certain task when they get stuck. These are the people that made Windows and Mac OS/OS X popular - by having things they can "prod at" until it seems to do what they want. The same people who write documents with jagged left margins/columns because they use spaces to indent because they don't know what the tab key is for.
And like it or not, for this very large group of people, the "desktop" needs to be familiar enough (ie look and work like Windows) for them to be able to carry on with their trial and error prodding to get things done. Without this level of ease, these people will never be Linux converts, and if done without care, can easily be turned into "tried it, it was crap and really hard to use" evangelists against Linux.

Remember the gag in one o the Star trek films where Scottie has to put the formula for "transparent aluminum" into the mac that's sat on a desk - and he picks up the mouse and starts talking to it ? It's OK as a joke (you think, how could someone that technically brilliant not know how to use a computer ?), but really like many good jokes, it's picking on something real and exaggerating it.
MOST USERS DON'T UNDERSTAND COMPUTERS - AT ALL.
More importantly, most of those DON'T CARE either.