Poster has demonstrated insight into the subject matter, and has posted a polite and well-written response.

Thread-drift aside (I'm no expert on bikes, but I presume some people buy those which are troublesome to maintain for the same reason people buy classic British cars, just so they have something to work on).

Mainly, I was just pointing out that *nix is actually known well enough and has come far enough on the usability front that people outside of the /. demographic are using it easily.

Bullshit. Only time I even touch the CLI is when I find it more efficient. NVidia drivers? One-click install. Restricted codecs? Same.

Never had to rollback drivers (or anything for that matter 'cept Opera), but I'd assume that Snapper on my OpenSuSE box provides for rollbacks of any other update drivers included. I wouldn't be surprised if other distros had similar functionality.

Mostly bullshit. Okay, my distro doesn't have a magic drivers button like *buntu, but I just hit Google and about 15 seconds later, drivers are installing after one click and a confirm prompt. No CLI needed.

Any modern distro has a well-integrated GUI that is just as stable as Windows or OS X. Hell, due to Apple wanting to make the OS idiot-proof, doing anything complicated in OS X requires knowledge of Bash. Want Time Machine to only make backups once or twice a day so it's not chewing up your HDD? Welcome to bash and adding a cronjob. Want ipfw to actually have a default deny cleanup rule instead of allow? Bash again, or a third-party utility.

That they are. This is a good thing. It means that users have choices, and good choices at that.

Thank you, but I do mean the grizzled heavily-tattooed leathery skin beer and a shot of whisky Harley rider type of biker.

And I must admit I was wrong on one front, namely that I excluded another (perhaps more) important reason that more people don't switch. Windows 7 is actually quite good, to the point where I actually bought a copy to dual-boot my laptop. OS X is also an amazingly solid OS. There actually is less of a reason to change than there was during the Vista days.

How about a good government regardless of size?

How is any polished distro like *buntu (including Mint), Fedora or OpenSuSE any less "premade" than Windows or OS X? And despite its small market share, Linux *is* now mainstream when I've had people ranging from random bikers at my local bar to grannies in a coffee shop come up to me and ask what distro I'm using and how happy they are that they switched. These are people who wouldn't know what to do if confronted with a command-line. The only reason more people don't switch is that they're resistant to change, and *won't* change their OS unless they evaluate changing their workflow as less of a hassle than what they already have.

Only downside I've had from liquid cooling is that the fscking radiator needs to be dusted on a nearly weekly basis.

Funny. I liquid-cool, and the only sound I here are my intake/exhaust fans. The impeller is silent, and the radiator fan is nearly so.

Define "cosmetics."

Here goes my chance to use my mod points in this thread, but we're talking about things like photo-shoots and mass-media. There isn't a male TV personality, film star, or what have you who *isn't* wearing makeup A lot of these guys are held up to be the "male ideal," just as much as overly photoshopped women are held up to be the "feminine ideal."

And cosmetics aren't just things like foundation and eyeliner. Men even outside the goth subculture use cosmetic products all the time. Try any sort of skin treatment (this includes shaving lotions), scent (cologne), hair product, soaps, what have you. People generally want to be attractive to their preferred gender.

The problem here is that as much as we wish to be an "enlightened society", women are still primarily judged by their looks (by both men and other women), moreso than men are. How many geek-loved films show the scrawny or overweight nerd getting the "hot chick"? Now how many have the scrawny/overweight nerdy chick (without total make-over) get the "hot guy"? How often are intelligent women judged by their looks rather than what they have to say?

Even those of us who claim to reject pop-culture still fall into this horrible mindset. I personally know a (petite) woman who has a Master's degree in addition to speaking several languages, and understands all things sciency ask me if the trousers she was wearing "made her arse look big." Via cultural osmosis, even the smartest and well-educated amongst us can fall victim to this sort of nonsense.

Where's the mod-option for "tragically true?"

I'm no Constitutional scholar, but I've always taken the bit "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." to mean that ultimately, Intellectual "Property" ultimately belonged to the Commons and copyright was merely a limited grant to allow creators to exclusively draw profit for a short while. Whether or not that was the original intent, the system has gone too far in allowing thuggish "squatters" on public "property" control it via force of (government) arms. Even the creators who should be the ones benefiting from copyright have it taken away in a Devil's deal just so they can get what pittance these cartels are willing to grant.

It has gone beyond any reason and I wish there was some hope of a Pirate Party gaining any traction in my country. (Sorry, would have modded you up, but I felt the need to comment).

It's Spanish. It means "I killed."

Most people are stupid. Users are simply a subset of people. So yes, most users are stupid.

But I don't equate wanting things to "just work" with stupidity. If I want to tinker with something constantly, I run it under VirtualBox and play away. But I just want both my laptop and desktop to run the software I need, not crash, and give me constant hassles, just like any "stupid" user. There's a good reason why most of the crap in my crontab is shit I just don't want to deal with, nor think about.

As things now stand, the only problem with the Mac app store is that you can't add other repos. This Microsoft thing is far worse, since it hurts users. But it's less user stupidity than idiocy/short-sightedness on the part of MS.

I know that the number of times that this has been mentioned here probably exceeds my /. ID, but WINE does work remarkably well *most* of the time. Sure, there are still some things that either won't run, or run badly. Some things require hitting up google and using winetricks but otherwise run fine (including pretty much every game that I care about). Why not try it in a VM and see if it works well-enough?

To be fair, though, I really think that things in the Windows/Mac worlds are as dire as a lot of people here tend to think. Or maybe I'm just being overly optimistic.