Clams.....

[Roger]

This demonstrates one of the problems Linux generically suffers in the 
Desktop world. It demands too much knowledge of the internal part of the 
operating system.

Well, yes and no.
Rather it demands  sufficient knowledge to work on problems as they occur.
This was discussed many years ago and I have found that the knowledge 
and ability to get under the hood and fix things, by far outweighs the 
learning one must do to use/control ones computer.

In proprietary systems, the user, sheltered from everything, must rely 
on other more knowledgeable folk to fix or create endless varieties of 
apps to fix things for a fee.
In the nixes much can be generally fixed from the terminal, and the fee 
for this is learning and asking on list.

Let me give you an example of a potential catastrophe that happened to 
me on Saturday morning.
In Fedora 16 I run VirtualBox, In VBox I have xp and LinuxMint, Fedora 
17 will not install for me.
Anyway Linux Mint would not shut down, it locked, nothing would shut it 
off, so in a terminal I did ps aux |grep VirtualBox to find the process 
of VirtualBox and kill -9 processnumber to kill it. It would not kill.

I waited an hour in case the computer was processing something then I 
switched off the pc, tried a restart but errors galore during boot, 
faulty sectors and a whole lot of other faults.
The message at the end of the list of errors said <ctrl D> to continue 
or enter root password and run fsck to repair, I chose this option, 
logged in as root, fsck fixed everything and Fedora came up and operates 
perfectly.

Had this been exclusively GUI or a Windows machine it would have, for 
me, meant reformatting and reinstalling. Hours of misery, dozens of 
applications to reinstall and a dozen reboots.

If I could recommend anything in Linux it would be "Learn to use the 
terminal and text commands" They are tools of the trade.
Roger