The one drawback that I see for a PDF printer driver is that it cannot preserve hyperlinks within the document. The reason for this is that the printer driver has to implement the GDI interface which is all about drawing shapes and knows nothing about what those shapes represent. So, while the driver may faithfully represent the content of the document, it loses much with respect to meta content such as hyperlinks. The intrinisic converter does not suffer from this because it is rendering the PDF directly from the document. Properly executed, this should always produce a more satisfying effect.

I agree that we all have tendencies and drives that lead toward damaging behaviour. Civilisation is built on the realisation that, in order to live in the world, we need to control those emotions and passions. Yes, they are a part of us. However, as soon as I make the choice to behave in a civilised manner, that choice becomes as much a part of me as these "baser instincts". I don't believe that it is hypocritical at all to strive to be better than what I am. I can recognise my wretched behaviour and I can strive to rectify it.

I don't disagree that the internet will probably always be impossible to properly regulate. However, I find the notion that "it lays bare the core of who we really are" to be quite absurd. Many sites appear to be filled with people, comfortable behind a shield of psuedo-anonymity who engage in nasty, selfish, and indulgent behaviour. This behaviour is "not the core of who they are" but rather a projection in which they choose to indulge because of loosened inhibitions. I assert that the internet is merely a projection of "who we really are".

Echoing previous opinions that have already been written, the choice for many software vendors is limited by economics. If I have a limited number of developers and over 90% of my customers want to use windows, then economics dictates that I will allocate the majority of my resources to building and maintaining the software that I perceive that those users want. My employer faces a similar situation. We build measurement equipment (dataloggers and sensors) and write software to support communications with that equipment. The situation given above plus the decision, made years ago, to write many of our applications in Delphi with a lot of win32 specific calls makes it prohibitively expensive to properly support any other OS than windows.