Why Linux isn't ready for the desktop

My Linux at work (OpenSuSE 10.3) stopped working for no apparent reason the other day - well, not entirely, but it wouldn't start X-Windows and gave me the totally content-free error message "The display server has been shut down about 6 times in the last 90 seconds. It is likely that something bad is going on."

This was a major problem because I was running another server on that system under vmware, and when I tried to start up the virtual machine from the command-line instead of the usual GUI, that failed too. (I suspect it never had worked, I just hadn't tried it before now.)

Fortunately I have some experience of unix and after much net research I finally found the solution:

touch /var/cache/fontconfig/stamp
/usr/bin/fc-cache -f

but can you imagine what would happen if a typical home user hit a problem like that? It would be "Honey, where's the WinXP install disk?"...

As much as I love unix, it just isn't ready for prime time on the desktop. Which is why I do all my own work from the command-line still...

G