Make it user friendly.<p>You need to hide anything command line related from the user. Get UI&#x2F;UX &amp; HCI people to make everything simple. It shouldn&#x27;t take anyone more then a few moments to see what&#x27;s going on.<p>As programmers and software engineers: we need to make everything run out of the box, maybe even to the extent that windows applications will run via wine or a VM (Like Qubes OS). Even if it inflates the size of installs, we need drivers for the most common hardware on install disks. We also need support from manufacturers to get well-made drivers to the open-source market. (Hell, some more hardware implementations sticking to standards couldn&#x27;t hurt)<p>Do not expect the user can do anything or learn anything on the fly. They aren&#x27;t concerned with learning an operating system or concerned about learning about UNIX&#x2F;POSIX, they care about doing their work.<p>There really isn&#x27;t anything holding linux from the desktop market other then some legacy systems that don&#x27;t really work well&#x2F;aren&#x27;t flexible enough for a wide range of systems.<p>If you&#x27;re interested in some newer stuff, from chonical, that I feel will make a great difference and be a huge step forward in the right direction, look at Mir as well as Unity 8.<p>The progress is astounding as well as the results.<p>Can&#x27;t wait to hear what others think of this.