[0xdefec8]

Keep beating that strawman, you're sure to make a point eventually.

The argument isn't whether or not Linux is useful to a bunch of nerds, myself included, or whether or not I should kiss rms for bestowing this gift unto humanity for free. It's whether it's competitive against its better known closed source counterparts on the Desktop. And you basically answered that question in your first paragraph.

[krschultz]

Linux is better for me than Windows, hands down.

My girlfriend and parents prefer it too. If your entire interaction with the computer is through Firefox, a music player, and Office like it is for them, OpenOffice is actually closer to what they know than the "new" Office 2007. Subtract out viruses, add in never needing drivers (how do I make my printer work? just plug it in), and they are much happier under Linux than Windows.

I've installed it for a lot of people and there are basically 3 periods. 1) Installing (which turns a lot of people off if they can't get it right there). 2) Getting used to it (which basically is people learning it and finding out its not that alien) and 3) Preferring it.

I have yet to find someone who didn't get to stage 3 in about 6 months. You don't get it at first but eventually you go back to windows and start looking for the 'Always on Top' checkbox or you have a popup during a presentation and say, why the hell am I paying for this?

[sophacles]

Speaking of strawmen...

Please tell me which desktop you mean. Do you mean the home desktop? Or perhaps the administrative assistant desktop that needs access to the calendar, word, and email, (maybe the web too...). Perhaps you mean the desktops of the engineers, using autocad and a pile of specialized tools. And so on.

Each of the above has different needs (perhaps even vastly different). A smart consultant/company/etc would go ahead and stop trying to use the same tool for every job. Some of those environments could probably switch to linux, and after a couple of months of "getting used to it time" everything would continue on as if nothing happened.

The point is that "the desktop" has always struck me as a strawman to begin with.