[davidgerard]

The question is a common one, but it's close to Not Even Wrong.

Linux has won everywhere except the desktop, and that's for many reasons - one of which is Windows holding on with a vicelike grip. The first time Windows had actual desktop competition from Linux was 2007, with netbooks - they dropped the price of an XP licence to $5 or even $0 just to keep Linux the hell off the things.

So Linux can do most of the job, and it's other factors keeping it off rather than anything that could be fixed by a concerted developer effort on a single distro.

(Some serious backing to Wine development would possibly be useful here. But again, the forces aren't susceptible to pure development.)

Furthermore:

* there are different distros because people can.

* there are different distros because there are different use cases.

* Red Hat and Ubuntu are already huge and neither is going away any time soon.

[daredtothink]

Hey david!

What main features would a Linux dev team need to create to seriously compete with Windows? Obviously being able to support Windows/OS X applications is something that would be useful so Wine is great. What other things?

The thing that comes to mind preventing Linux is gaming. It is finally making some ground but Direct X is the leader and plays nicely with Windows.

[davidgerard]

I'll note, we have a Linux distro that is in fact doing stupendously well and has end-user consumer sales into the billions. It's called Android.

[davidgerard]

A use case for which it is unambiguously better, basically.

Wine continues to implement more and more of DirectX (cos the guys at Codeweavers are gamers too). Wine is really pretty bloody good these days.

I recall tales of WoW players running it in Wine specifically so people they'd pissed off couldn't h@xx0r them, but I have no idea on numbers.