Can anyone offer a more sensible user friendly flavour of linux that does not have the snobbery but hopefully runs programs like KiCAD
Most of the other popular flavors like Fedora and Arch are definitely less user friendly in my opinion. Linux Mint, as suggested by BoredAtWork, might be worth a look.
Well I'm dumbstruck - firstly by the poor performance (due to it completely ignoring the hardware and treating everything as just some bog standard bit of legacy kit if it see's it at all)
You're unlikely to get much better hardware support in other distributions unless it happens to be supported by a slightly newer version of whatever software is responsible (eg. kernel or X). If it's graphics hardware, there's an option in Ubuntu to install proprietary AMD/nVidia drivers with just a few clicks from the system settings -> hardware -> additional drivers dialog.
and still unnecessary complication of the user interface along with deliberate snobby differences to windows (like putting the close, minimize and maximize buttons on the opposite side even though earlier they were on the right like windows and not the left along with the loss of a proper program menu list)
So copying Windows is correct but copying Mac OS is snobbery? If you want a Windows clone, just use Windows.
along with some similarities despite them claiming snobbily that linux is not windows like copy, paste and cut keyboard shortcuts being the same along with shift+delete deleting a file bypassing the rubbish bin.
Most of these shortcuts pre-date Windows. I believe the ctrl+C/V/X/Z shortcuts came from the original Macintosh (maybe even earlier) and the ctrl/shift+ins/del stuff came from some IBM standard in the DOS days.
despite all the pitch lines about how ubuntu runs on millions of devices all over the world and is great for beginners for custom use or indeed simple setting up of the pc's hardware you apparently need to have full command of the terminal - bit of a contradiction there !
Posting rants without useful details is usually a good way to get problems solved.
(a) Going back to Ubuntu 10.4 LTE and if necessary applying the fix to change the window icons back to were they belong (I don't remember if Canonical screwed them up in 10.4 LTE already or only later).
Putting the controls back in the right corner can be fixed in gconf. Not exactly user-friendly, but better than the Windows registry that Windows often requires you to edit. I don't really mind them being in the other corner, at least since they just copied the Mac order instead of the first iteration which was minimize-maximize-close.
In some rare cases you can find some driver source code somewhere on the net. But getting such random driver source code running is a gamble these days. One of the reasons Linux distributions got so popular is because people are pissed of having to build drivers and applying magic to get it running.
If the driver is not in the most recent distributions, you're usually screwed in my experience. Unless support was just added in the next kernel release. Third party drivers that are not included in the kernel are often unmaintained, incomplete or unstable. Otherwise they would have been included.