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"It has some speed-bumps to overcome: support for hardware, ease of use for everyman, and too many combative *nix fan-boys."

I'm not sure what combative fan-boys have to do with it. Apple has them too and so does Windows. There are egos and immaturity in every camp.

Where Linux wins is on plasticity. Check out the screenshots for the Linpus distro. Their "easy mode" is almost too easy. To the point where a dedicated fan boy like me says, "What? Is that all it can do?" (They have a normal mode too, with KDE.)

Hardware is a concern, but usually only in specialty cases and with certain distros. My dad's new HP DV9500 laptop didn't get along with Ubuntu's ALSA (sound driver) version. The ALSA devs have already fixed the problem and it doesn't exist in distros using the latest version. Tutorials on adding those mods to Gutsy can be found on the Ubuntu forums. Just follow the recipe...

I see the hardware problem becoming non-existent in the near future. We already have major players like Dell, Everex, Lenovo, and ASUS rolling out computers with Linux pre-installed.

Anon -

Fan-boys have a lot to do with it. They run people off, sort of like the folks that stand on street corners and preach at the tops of their lungs. And I don't think that I have ever come across a Vista fan-boy.

I have tried the easy install of Ubuntu's latest and greatest on a half dozen computers and have yet to have it work. I can do it the hard way; that's not the point. I was running Unix on the supercomputers of the eighties. It has to be EASY for most users. I understand that you like *nix. I like it, too. That does not make it ready for prime time. If it were ready for prime time, it would be taking the world by storm. As it stands, it's not even drizzling yet.

But it is close. It has, as I said, made major progress in the last few years. The last mile is the hardest.

Michael

Two myths. One, Vista is failing. I absolutely love it, and so does everyone else I know. It's fast, easy, nearly crashproof, and all my old software now works on it.

Two, Ubuntu is easy to use. It's next to impossible. As the other guy stated, it can't even be installed on thousands of computers. More to the point, once it's installed, it's a nightmare to work with. Nothing works, applications crash for no reason, it's hard to get online, and it burns your laptop battery in under an hour. There is very limited software, just hundreds of versions of the same generic nonsense. Out of the box, you can't play mp3's, watch movies, or dvds. My system crashed halfway through an update, and now I can't update any of the software on the machine. Installing a small application is a ten minute process, and half of the time it doesn't work when installed. Why? Who knows, the computer doesn't give you an error message. It spends 20 seconds trying to load an application, then simply gives up. One day, Linux decided to take Vista out of the start menu and I had to spend an hour learning how to alter the boot configuration to give it back to me. It runs slow, needs constant updates and modifications just to keep it working, and no one is around to help you. You go on to the Ubuntu forums, and there are thousands of people just like you who can't get anything to work, and thousands of others giving one useless solution after another.

Personally, I'm thrilled with Vista, and consider it the best operating system ever made. I see no reason to use a second rate toy to run my computer on.