^^^^^^^^My most recent Linux installation was Red Hat's Fedora Core 2^^^^^^^^^^
I understand now. You need something which has more polish. You are using a distribution which is intended as a "proving ground" for RH's server line.(fedora is very solid but is not consumer grade) You might as well use RHEL and complain how un-user friendly it is.
Try Suse 10 or ubuntu then make your case. My dad the mac user(that would be tiger) is very impressed with Yast.(for example)
^^^^^^^^^^^I'll be upgrading it to FC4 soon, but don't expect any major improvements in the GUI.^^^^^^^^^^
That's right, you won't. That's not really the goal of Fedora.
There's a old saying - You can polish a turd all day, but it's still a turd. That pretty well describes desktop Linux. Merely putting more polish on it won't fix the real problems.
Ubuntu, Suse, Mandriva, Red Hat, etc. - they're all stuck in the X11/Gnome/KDE world of inconsistent amateur superficial lipstick-on-a-pig Windows 95 GUI workalikes.
They target lowest common denominator hardware with a primitive graphics architecture, so they don't support advanced technology for screen drawing. The system fonts and typographic layouts are ill-proportioned and look awful, so it's hard to look at for any extended length of time. A good working knowledge of Linux system commands is still needed to use them, so it's best suited for hobbyists - not a typical computer user. It's not a desktop system I'd want to use for more than a few minutes, or recommend to my friends unless they were dirt-poor and couldn't afford a decent computer.
Mac OS X has the superior technology at affordable prices for desktop computer users - without requiring the user to know anything about UNIX.