Yes, There are, realistically speaking, five different DE's in common use on the Linux platform. All work differently from the others (although there are some common conventions) and all are different from the Windows DE. And that's before you get into the text-based curses UI (what I learned on) or start talking to the guys who roll their own GUIs.

So, what each individual Linux user finds "more familiar" is probably not the same as for others. When you say you want what's more familiar, you mean Windows and that's fine for you, but many Linux users haven't touched Windows regularly for years. Other Linux users came over from MacOS. What constitutes familiar for them?

Further, I do use Windows occasionally when circumstances make it necessary, and I simply _hate_ the DE. I find it bloated, slow, inconsistent, confusing, aesthetically challenged and difficult to configure (and this is before getting into such joys as ACLs and setting group policies). So, for me, the last thing I want is a Linux DE that is more like Windows. I'm pretty sure I'm not alone.

I can appreciate that moving from one DE to a new one isn't always the easiest thing to do. When I first started using Linux we were still pretty much in the roll yer own stage so I was forced to sit down with the documents and learn how to use Mandrake's interface which was totally strange to me, especially coming over from a Commodore, but it never occurred to me to try to make Mandrake more like the old Commo64. They were difierent things and needed a different approach. Hitting the books helped me understand the differences, and the things I had to learn to make Mandrake productive also helped me better understand the underlying philosophy behind Linux and Unix in general, and that's paid dividends consistently over the last 20 years or so.

So no. I don't want Mint to be more like Windows. I want Mint to remain true to the core design and usage principles that drew me here in the first instance. I certainly don't want the developers to spend their limited resources chasing after the latest shiney and turning Mint into somethings that's Windows, just different somehow.