Probably because you all speak English over there, not American ;-)

Not long before he died, my grandfather and I were able to bond over this.

Now, he did not know the first damn thing about computers. Given that he spent most of the first two decades of his life without electricity, I really could not blame him. However, he was a furniture salesman from the 50s through the 70s. I was relating to him some of the frustration of front line tech support, and he told me about some of the things he dealt with back then. Like people calling in because they bought ironing boards, and the ironing board was not ironing their clothes. Or those newfangled microwaves. People would buy them, put the food in, and not understand why the food was not cooking even though they had not turned any dials or pressed any buttons. We shared quite a few laughs over people misunderstanding technologies that are so elementary today a child can use them.

Why install another whole OS, set up virtualization, get windows working and install the quilting application when just installing windows and electric quilt does the same exact thing? Would you ask hypothetical Joe Enduser and reasonably expect him to be successful in this task? He would likely give up in the hour, say his computer is broken, and would have the Geek Squad charging him out the nose to reinstall windows (fix) his computer, and whenever somebody mentioned Linux, would relate his horror stories, turning more users off from ever trying it.

And he would be totally justified in doing so.

Until there is a Linux distro that "just works" as well as an average new windows installation, there will only be niche uptake of Linux.

Bug fixes without having to pay Microsoft through the nose. Although I would hope at this point most enterprises can work around whatever bugs might crop up in relation to their software.

Define a decent try. In my most recent long term attempt, I used Slackware for over a year starting two years ago. I got tired of rebooting to play games, so I dumped it. I recently tried to install various distros on my laptop, and on each one, some hardware would not work. I am now running Windows 7 Beta, and it has better hardware support than any of the distros I tried (Ubuntu, Suse, Slackware, and Fedora).

I like Linux. I really wish it met my needs. But it doesn't, and I am hardly unique in my usage patterns.

Ad Hominem? Never on Slashdot!

Actually, my wife is the Adobe user. For myself (and her as well) it is games. There are still plenty of DX9 games that will not render correctly in WINE, and we will not even start on DX10 support.

Until, of course, they try to download the latest Big Fish or PopCap game and it won't even install.

At least until you try to get a Dell wifi card working.

You identify the problem yourself however. It does not support all applications 100%. Windows, however, has full native support for Windows applications. To Joe user, it is a no brainer.

Honestly, it is the same reason I have never fully made the switch to Linux. Every time I try (since Slackware 6 was new) there is something that does not work. I already spend 9-10 hours a day making computers work, I don't want to spend all of my free time making my home system work.

The flashbacks also show that they had a choice in their destinies. Each flashback shows pivotal moments that led to the characters being where they were when The Fall came. Had they made other choices, they likely would have died in the holocaust.

Speed, plain and simple. They use the faster drives for whatever regular disk access they need, and stuff that does not get used as much or just does not need that much speed get shuffled off to the slower but larger drives.

Explosives + Old Hardware = Good Times!