Photoshop is superior in comparison to Gimp, agreed. But don't get started with Microsoft Office. If you want to beautiful typesetting, a simple LaTeX environment would suffice and plenty are available on Linux.
1.You can disable automatic updates.
2.You can remove the notification applets in the gnome-panel.
3.Probably it was a case of bad network. And hourglass belonged to Windows, you shouldn't expect it here.
4.That's what you do. Be patient.
5.You shouldn't have clicked it again because the first instance is still loading.
6.Be patient.
7.I told you, point 5.
If you think that these are valid enough reasons to believe the usability of Linux is poor, I really sympathize with you. And all of this is about updating the system. When I can update Windows or OSX by just issuing a command like "sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade" I will change my operating system.
But the Wordpress.com support of LaTeX is very limited. For one thing, it uses a LaTeX to image converter and the images always pixelate when you zoom in. Another advantage of using MathJax is that, right clicking any equation gives the LaTeX source. And lack of good LaTeX support on Wordpress.com was just an observation, I had no intention of comparing them!