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I feel the need  to stop for a minute in our relentless pursuit of news and gossip from the computer industry and explain a few things about me and my perspective on some things, mainly operating systems. From some of the comments that are rolling in, I think there may be a misunderstanding or two about how I feel about two things in particular: Windows and Linux.

First, I'm not anti-Windows, even though I may be getting to be somewhat anti-Microsoft in my old age. There is a lot to thank Microsoft for. Back in the semi-early days of micro-computers, when the operating system and hardware wars were going full-throttle, Microsoft started to unify things. Then, with Windows, they almost cornered the marketplace. That is not great from an anti-monopolistic point of view (mine) but it was great for interoperability.

This was all was back before the great levelers, the Web and browsers ,made it easy for all of us to talk to each other. Back then, generally, you had to move things by sneaker-ware on a floppy disk. If your machine and the target machine were not the same, there were big problems. Windows, by the simple act of becoming wildly popular, made the PC revolution possible. PCs were not going far if General Motors could not communicate easily with General Mills using them.

Over the years, though, the brash young Microsoft has calcified. They don't innovate any more, they follow. Over and above all other goals, they seek to protect their legacy code and their legacy position. Their code has become stodgy, and leaky, and slow. They have exploited their near-monopoly position unethically if not illegally, for far too long. I am a huge Open Source advocate and Microsoft is just the opposite. Vista was just the last straw for me. I won't go there.

Then there is Linux. As I said in response to a comment, I am far from anti-Linux, or anti-*nix. I have been using *nix since the very early eighties. As the great-great-great grandchild of my first date with Berkeley Unix (in Berkeley, actually), I know that Linux is something I can depend on. It is rock solid, well-designed, safe, and so on. But it is not yet easy enough to use for the great unwashed masses (as I am absolutely sure the Linux fan-boys think of them) that make up over 99% of the PC desktop marketplace.

Currently, there is no Linux distro that is as easy to install or use as Windows XP. If it was as easy to use, especially since it is free, we would not be having the Windows discussion. Linux would have long since buried Windows. But Linux is not all that much better than Vista at hardware support, and not nearly as good as XP. You still have to mess with it too much on the OS level, and as long as you need to do that, it is not going to win the OS war. That does not put me off. But it does put off most users. Despite what the responses to this column will be from the Linux priesthood, Linux is much more hands-on than Windows.

The people who have taken vows in the Linux brotherhood need to stop making noises about how great it is and just take the few final steps necessary to make it easier to use than Windows XP. That sort of ease of use is what the marketplace requires, and no distro of Linux is there yet. Linux is a hands-on operating system trying to break into a hand-off marketplace. Fix the usability issues and the hardware compatibility problems and Linux will win. You can write all the negative comments about this that you want to. What I am saying is true. If it were not, Linux would already be the leading desktop in the world.

I know that it is possible to make *nix work better than Window XP. I'm writing this column sitting out on my deck with a MacBook Pro, a cup of coffee, and Tucker the Weird Dawg. OS X is what Linux needs to be in order to take over the desktop. If Linux acolytes are serious about winning the war of the desktops, they will make that happen. If they are not, they won't. It's a fairly simple equation.

Just to be evenly curmudgeonly to all sides, I'm not really happy about the Apple situation, either. I love the hardware. I love the software. But Apple is so completely proprietary in nature that they make IBM look open. It is this blatant opposition to true Open Source, even more than the rampant elitism of Apple, that makes me less than perfectly happy with my decision to move there.

I suppose what I really want is something Completely Different, to borrow a phrase from the Monty Python boys. Windows is over twenty years old. *nix is older yet. Where is the new operating system that we deserve? The one built from the ground up for the Web. The OS for the people, Open Source and ready to take on the world on the terms of the twenty-first century. Somebody must be working on that! Come on, let's see the Next Big Thing in operating systems!