Adobe has an 'Alpha' 64-bit Flash player out for Linux. It's kept up-to-date (well, sort of). I would consider it mid-Beta quality. Actually, it works just about as well as the 32bit official version, so, draw whatever conclusions you like. It's available on their 'Labs' section. Don't bother with the installer, it breaks things. Important things. Instead, just extract the .so and link it up yourself.

Flash works as well in Chrome as it does in Firefox. Flash performance on Linux is far below what I would consider "fine". At least in Chrome, when Flash starts gobbling up RAM and CPU, you just lose the one tab, and not the entire browser.

Psshhh... ultra-stable? 9.10 is the worst distro Ubuntu has had since I started using it back at Fiesty (7.04). I'll give you one example -- Upstart. Upstart is absolute crap. It tries to do away with a convention (Init) that has worked for years, and is standard across many distros, and replace it with one that was never ready for prime-time. They didn't even get the script for frackin' X right -- they had to push a patch through to stop upstart from constantly restarting X if, for some reason, your configuration was bad. That really pissed off those of us that had intel on-board graphics that made the driver Karmic shipped with poo itself.

The ISO's don't come with stickers. I need my Ubuntu stickers, dammit!

Doesn't the Jarvik artificial heart work just like this?

I just click the stupid 'display it' button when opening text files. It's not really that big of a deal for me, and I like having my USB key be readable by anything I stick it in.

I hate them so much that I download my movies twice. By their math, that costs them twice as much money. If all us pirates would just band together and download all of our pirated movies twice, we'll soon cost them so much that we'll put them out of business.

I thought paying SCO off was equivalent to smoking cock and, ahem..., bagging tea.

True. The carrier signal of The Internet is stupidity. Whenever you go online, whatever you are seeing is really carried to you by modulated stupidity.

It used to use a porn-based signal, but too many people got caught watching the raw stream at work. "After awhile you don't see the code, all you see is Blonde, Brunette, Redhead."

If I accidentally rear-end a city bus in traffic, is that a felony? What if I cut one off in traffic? That would be interfering with the operation, correct? What if I hold the door to a subway car open so that someone's leg doesn't get caught and mangled? Felony?

If I only had mod points. Well played, sir!

None of the open-source drivers, either from the manufacturer or 3rd party support hardware video decoding, however, closed-source Linux drivers for the big 3 GPU manufacturers (intel, nvidia, and AMD) all contain the necessary code to accelerate video playback, if the hardware supports it. Of these, nvidia's support in the playback applications (VLC, mplayer, etc.) is the most mature and robust. Intel is not far behind. AMD, to my knowledge, is not currently supported, even though the features are available in the drivers, the libraries to hook into the drivers are not available yet. I researched this when building a Linux-based HTPC. Went with a GeForce 8200-based board. Full support for MPEG, H.264, etc. decoding in hardware using Mplayer, VLC, and XBMC video player.

Linux versions of Flash are, IMHO, horrible. Ubuntu ships with an open-source alternative which is worse.

Windows is the best choice if you want it to just work. Most people that complain, shout, and scream about how terrible Linux is, and how they're switching back to Windows expected Linux to 'just work'. Linux is fine if you can put in a little time to get things to work that the distro wasn't specifically designed to do.

I was thinking that option 2 is probably their best bet. Strip down an open-source virtualization package and package it with an image of their new OS (virtualbox comes to mind, but there's no USB support in their open-source variant). Make it all up into a nice installer that installs the virtualization software and does all the heavy lifting configuring it. This eliminates the need for an optical drive that so many netbooks do not have. To your last point, for large-scale adoption, open-sourcing an OS is not necessary. I'd be willing to bet that less than 5% of users of an OS care that it's free to change and make derivative works of. 95% or more would care that it's free-as-in-beer. The true killer OS is one that is functionally equivalent to the current leader (MS Windows), but cost-free (or even less costly that Windows). That's a tall order, because for much of the population, the cost of Windows is included with the computer when they order/buy it. When it gets old/slow, they go out and buy a new one, and the newest version of Windows is included with that one as well. They don't specifically see the cost, so they assume there is none.

I gave up on VMWare when they went to that terrible web-based interface. They had a perfectly good interface. Now I need to spin up a browser, JAVA, their buggy-assed plugin, and God knows what else. I can get a VBox VM up from clicking on the virtualbox icon to VM up and usable in under a minute. It took 2 or 3 to get VMWare's crappy web interface up and responsive.

Well I'll be.. I've got the box mine came in right here in front of me, and you're right. But I swear I saw it there, or somewhere in the manual or something. Guess not. BTW, my box has Corinne Bailey Rae on the front, and also did not include a song.