>Desktop Linux is the reason people don't use Linux on the desktop. I'm sorry but it's truly awful and probably won't ever get better. In the absence of product direction you have us geeks making everything configurable
Have you tried Unity or G-S lately? I'm not as willing to argue G-S has as clear a direction as Unity, but they both ship with a very limited amount of configurability and they're both insanely easy to start using even without background knowledge.
Anecdote: I've used Ubuntu for a long time, but due to some nonfree applications dependence on mac/win I've gotten myself a apple laptop. It's mostly the same, I use a browser, terminal, vim and a thousand silly apps but they are about the same amount of config-time.
The biggest difference is that Ubuntu ships with APT and a lot of tools that are good for a hacker, but it's not to hard to get equivalents on osx.
Summary: Mac OS and Ubuntu are more on par in ease to use than I could have believed before I tried.
Have you tried Unity or G-S lately? I'm not as willing to argue G-S has as clear a direction as Unity, but they both ship with a very limited amount of configurability and they're both insanely easy to start using even without background knowledge.