Got to be careful with this. It only takes an extension and a few more meeting rooms before you are asking people to meet in the Cradle of Filth.

See how effective it is? There is a relevant comment hidden in the above post - I challenge anyone to find it!

But on the other hand, some hardware is an utter pain under Windows, and just works under Linux. Case in point: my cheapo webcam and my video capture card. Under Linux, plug and play, under Windows, even the supplied driver disk didn't work.

As far as installing software is concerned, I find it much easier under Linux, and get a bit paranoid under Windows about downloading random stuff and running it. But that's just my opinion.

For most users (e.g. my wife), they genuinely don't care, and as long as everything is set up to start with, Linux is a perfectly viable option.

However, I think that there will not be "the year of Linux on the desktop", but this is OK, because instead there will be a gradual evolution away from "the desktop" as Windows users expect it to be. There may instead be a year of "the desktop replacement" and that could very easily be running on Linux. Mobile phones and netbooks are possibly the first widespread examples of computers without a traditional desktop.