Personally, I run a Debian Wheezy desktop, and after the first week I haven't needed to touch a shell. (And most "regular users" wouldn't need to touch the shel

Personally, I run a Debian Wheezy desktop, and after the first week I haven't needed to touch a shell. (And most "regular users" wouldn't need to touch the shell that first week.) Updates happen near-automatically, I get a dialog pop up when they happen that asks me to enter the root password and confirm that I'd like packages X, Y and Z to be updated. Those updates have never broken my system. When I upgrade my system from Wheezy to... I think it's Jessie, next, I probably will have to drop down to the shell, however the instructions are listed quite cleanly on the Debian website and elsewhere. Ubuntu, otoh, goes the whole way and provides a GUI tool for upgrading the system.