Massive improvements in usability have come about through bug fixes, increasing the completeness of applications, and better packaging of applications. I doubt

Massive improvements in usability have come about through bug fixes, increasing the completeness of applications, and better packaging of applications. I doubt the people doing that work thought of it as "usability" work, but it makes a huge difference. A lot of Linux's traditional usability problems have simply been missing functionality: missing GUI applications or missing features in major applications. Power users can often fill in the blanks by using extra utilities (transcoding a video file if their favorite video player won't play it, for example) but average users will be completely stymied, with the extra insult of spending ten minutes searching through the app's menus and preferences trying to find a feature that isn't there.