Ahh... so it wasn't that Linux wasn't ready for the desktop, but that your desktop wasn't ready for Linux.

This statement only makes sense if you're a mad fanboy. The purpose of every piece of software is to provide a service to the end user. Anything obstructing that, regardless of reason, is going to be blamed on the software. If the hardware is working perfectly fine with operating system "A", but fails to work with operating system "B", clearly the user won't blame the hardware - it's clearly working fine!

Being an experienced Windows user myself who has tried using Linux (though not very recently) as well, I read the guide to see if things had improved. Unfortunately the guide skipped over the point in the installation where all my previous attempts at installing Linux have halted: when the installation is complete, but you are missing one or more of:

1) Sound (with more than two channels, if even that)
2) Accelerated graphics
3) Networking (wired or wireless)
4) Bluetooth stack

Now, with some tweaking, I know it's possible to get these things working, because I've done it. But you expect me to believe that Linux has gotten so good with hardware now that I won't have to, when installing on a computer that isn't "ready for Linux", but rather a perfectly good computer that I have already bought and paid for some years back, not knowing (or caring) at the time that I might some day install Linux on it?

Don't people realize that Linux actually has much better hardware support than any OS out there?

How would you define "better" in this case? Do you mean that the list of devices that are supported to some degree is longer than for any other OS? Because again, from the end user's POV, that's completely irrelevant. The end user cares whether the new printer he bought on sale will work out of the box. With Windows it can be safely assumed that pretty much anything will Just Work (unless it's got an Apple logo on it). Are you telling me that this is the case with Linux, assuming the user is not going to verify compatibility prior to the purchase?

Of course, if this had happened during an RC release of a major Linux distro, the comments would be more along the lines of "zomgwtfbbq, Linux is so popular now the masses can't get hold of it fast enough" whereas since it's a Windows RC being released, people are taking the opportunity to flame like idiots instead.

Doesn't paint a very pretty picture of the FOSS community.

Just a wild guess: Perhaps the family filter talks to Live.com in order to filter "inappropriate" results out. Other search engines not owned by Microsoft don't support this integration, so the filter blocks them as they would otherwise be a trivial way around the filter.

Just ONCE, I'd like to see someone back this statement up with facts. Since you're not an AC I have a slight hope you're not just trolling, so please, enlighten me:

By what objective, verifiable metric is Vista a "failure"?

If your claim is that Vista is a "failure" simply because not everybody is using it yet, consider that this may simply be a case of XP being good enough that people don't really see a reason to upgrade. After all, most of the important changes between XP and Vista are under the hood. Users either won't notice them or won't understand them (UAC).

As for downgrade options, that's mostly for low-grade PCs. There's no reasonable alternative to Windows XP in the "sub-notebook" space because Vista was built expecting new computers to be faster, not slower, than those before; whereas many "netbooks" are so shitty that they struggle to run acceptably even with XP, once you've got too many tabs open in 'fox. The netbook vendors tried shipping Linux but then return rates spiked.

When you run Vista on the hardware that it was designed for (two cores and two gigs of RAM is about the minimum), it's easily the best released Windows yet, and you would be a fool to run XP on such a machine.

Windows Mobile smartphones and PDAs support tethering out of the box; all the ones I've owned anyway. As for VoIP, depends on what client you wanna use, but Skype has a free WM client and since WM phones usually aren't locked down very hard (being targeted at business users rather than Joe Sixpack) you can just install whatever you need.

Interesting. While I haven't taken the plunge myself (and won't) the reflections I've heard from most of my Mac-using friends are the opposite of yours. They like the hardware and aren't too bothered by the lack of user-servicability, but they prefer running some flavour of Linux - or in some cases, Vista - on their sleek-looking Apple hardware. I personally can't stand OS X, and I'm not a fan of white plastic, so I'll stick with PCs for the time being.

I find it quite amusing that most people in this discussion are either mac-heads bashing linux users, or linux-users bashing mac heads. It is a refreshing change to find that windows doesn't even make the minimum grade for people to bother attacking it.

Either that, or the Windows users are busy actually getting work done while the mac/linux fanbois fight their pointless religious wars.

What's the point of "attacking" any OS to begin with? If you're content with what you use, good for you. I couldn't care less if you prefer Xenix or DR-DOS.

I'm not 100% certain, but I think you'll find that gcc has shipped with all versions of Mac OS X. In fact, Windows is the only modern system I know of that DOESN'T ship with a C compiler.

While I don't have a Mac handy to confirm this, a quick Google suggests that OS X does not include GCC. Rather, it's included with XCode, which is a free download from Apple, much like the free version of Visual Studio from Microsoft.

Malware compile code? What's the point?

It's just another attack vector. Malware could potentially use a compiler to recompile itself on the fly to avoid detection from heuristic algorithms; it could also conceivably fool some detection schemes by transporting its main payload as code (anti-virus programs typically only care about executables) and compiling it later. Furthermore, a system like Linux where lots of software is compile-on-install is potentially vulnerable to the compiler itself being replaced by a malignant version which poisons the executables it compiles.

All these are just my guesses; I don't know enough about hacking to construct all the possible attacks exploiting the presence of a compiler on the target system. However, as a general rule, every additional piece of software you include with your OS is an additional exploit vector.

When someone rips of GCC development by writing a proprietary plugin, what exactly would make that person "the hand that feeds GCC developers"? Isn't it more like the opposite?

Not the developers; the users of GCC benefit (are "fed") by the availability of plugins, proprietary or no. I assume that most developers of GCC are also users, so this benefits the developers as well.

Also, I would hope that the developers of a popular software package would see fit to act in the best interests of their users, rather than fight stupid religious wars over which of proprietary/open is better. Fact is we'll always have both kinds of code, so we should try to get along with each other rather than fight pointlessly.

Unfortunately many free software advocates are more than happy to fight these wars, because they put ideology above the goal of creating great software, making them no better than the greedy corporations they so despise.

why should the GCC & Linux projects make things easy for the proprietary guys?

Because biting the hand that feeds you have never been a good strategy. There's not enough open hardware - free operating systems are still dependent on the goodwill of proprietary vendors to be able to support mainstream hardware with anywhere near the same features and performance as users of proprietary OS take for granted.

Granted, this may well change soon, but until then making it hard for hardware developers to provide good Linux drivers is just making things harder for Linux users who have no interest in being dragged into your religious wars.

If you aren't provided with a tool that lets you tell the system how to operate, you haven't got an operating system.

Yeah, Windows and OSX are broken because neither ship by default a tool that would be useless to >99% of its userbase but whose presence on every PC would be utterly adored by malware authors. Doh!

Besides you can get a compiler for most any OS in five minutes on the 'net nowadays. Only for systems that actually compile parts of themselves during install is it necessary to include one.

Sorry for replying twice to the same post, but I forgot to reply to one thing.

you _can_ play the songs you bought on every device you own

It is simply not true that switching to Linux will free you from DRM restrictions on music. If you already own DRM restricted media that works on Windows, you'll need a player with DRM to play that on Linux. What on Linux can actually play DRM'd Windows Media or iTunes files? So switching to Linux would deny you access you your legally purchased music in this case.

Second possibility is that you own no DRM restricted media. In that case switching to Linux will make no difference. Numerous players are available for virtually all types of non-DRM media for Linux as well as Windows. Of course, if you make the mistake of buying such crippled media, you will be in the same situation as above (won't play on Linux, might work on Windows).

The third possible interpretation of your words is that using Linux will magically remove DRM restrictions on media. Citation needed! Nothing in Windows prevents you from doing whatever you want with legally purchased, DRM-free media. Linux has NO advantage over Windows here (except if you believe that the support for DRM in Windows somehow "bloats" the OS even if you don't use DRM'ed media, an argument unsupported by fact).