Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has unveiled a canny plan to finally drive mass-adoption of the user-unfriendly and geeky Linux operating system on the desktop.

Shuttleworth had the following comments to make at O’ Reilly’s OSCON conference this week:

“I think the great task in front of us in the next two years is to lift the experience of the Linux desktop from something stable and usable and not pretty, to something that’s art,” Shuttleworth said. “Think of the way the iPhone uses a pure software experience, it abstracts away all the hardware.

“You can paint anything on the screen because it’s all software.”

If this essentially means eliminating the command-line tool from the Ubuntu Linux distribution completely then I’m all in favour of this as a giant step forward for Linux.

But this still doesn’t solve the problem of flaky hardware support, severe lack of quality software on the Linux platform and community support driven by arrogant elitism. You can dress a pig in Prada but it’s still a pig. Or in the case of Linux, pig shit.

I hope Shuttleworth plans on hiring some high quality graphic designers and user interface experts. Because I’ve yet to see any kind of proof that people in Open Source are capable of designing human-friendly user interfaces that appeal to a majority of people.

We also need to toss out the variants of Ubuntu using different desktop managers. Let’s standardize everything on Gnome, get the community to focus on building one great desktop experience, and maybe, just maybe, you’ll be able to persuade the likes of Adobe to port their great application suites to Linux.

Until that happens Linux will continue to live in complete obscurity. And that’s where it will rightfully belong I’m afraid.

I wish Shuttleworth well because he has taken on one hell of a challenge in trying to take Ubuntu and Linux to the masses. But I sense he would ultimately have been better off investing in Microsoft, and actively supporting them in their fight to dominate Google and online advertising in the same way they dominate everyone with their software on the desktop.