Pardon me for being dumb, but a major hurdle to learning Linux is the 
directory. The file  abbreviations are made for the text console and 
keyboard, but with a nice GUI a descriptive name system would really 
help. 

Also, the directory tree seems less than hierarcical. 

I'm using old SuSE 6.4. I've played with old and new Gnome, and old and 
new KDE. The stylistic "Nautilus" and "Konqueror" are dubious file 
manager improvements.

MS Windows (since 3.0) does have a very clean directory and system 
configuration structure. I realize this is an apples and oranges 
comparison. But even simple configuration of Linux isn't simple.