[DanBC]

I'm not getting into a religious war but:

I've had printer driver problems on OSX and on some Windows versions. The problem with printers is the evil practice of selling the machines at (or near) loss, and making money on ink / toner. Caveat Emptor applies.

Windows users (used to? Still do?) have problems with installing software. They wouldn't use the add software wizard; the software would install things in weird places; there were legacy problems. A common technique used by Windows users was to just reformat and reinstall. That's user ignorance, not a fault of the OS, but it still shows that simple app installs can cause problems.

And dropping to the command line to do stuff - well, you do that on any os, especially if you're a power user. Are there really simple tasks that can only be done on cli in Linux, that a typical user would come across?

I agree that Linux isn't ready for the masses; but then I think OS X and Windows are not really ready for the masses.

[tjwebb]

My definition of competitiveness does not imply equivalence. For example, Windows and OSX are expensive, while Ubuntu is free. A free market would suggest that it should be slightly inferior since it is free. Each OS has strengths and weaknesses. The point of this article is to illuminate the fact that Ubuntu can be seriously considered as an alternative to Windows/OSX for the average person.

[solnyshok]

having spent countless nights to get all my laptop's devices work and sleep/hibernate - I have come to the conclusion that "free" is a bit wrong word to describe ubuntu, and that I'm in it only for "geek" cred. However, it certainly getting cheaper with each release. Now, I only need to edit grub once to enable hibernation.

[freehunter]

>but then I think OS X and Windows are not really ready for the masses

They're not, I agree, but they're there regardless. And it takes something special and completely different to break out of that (see, iPad).

[tjwebb]

I've also had printer issues, particularly with OSX. Printer idiosyncrasies still exist on all platforms, but I'm not about to call OSX unworthy because it doesn't work with a certain printer.