Re:Two reasons why Linux cannot be used (Score 3, Insightful)

Let me jump in and add something to that: three years ago, I went through the entire process of setting up a 80 desktop environment using Linux. I set up an LDAP server, Samba, home folders on a centralized share, print servers using CUPS, mail server using Dovecot/EXIM, a centralized configuration system and a minimal level of failover redunancy... in short: the works. The system worked nice and stable, but it took me 2 months to get everything up and running (granted, at the time, I was new to LDAP and it took some time to set up the master/slave replication, integrate PAM & Samba into it and write my own scripts to keep Linux and Windows passwords synchronized). A year later, I configured a similar set-up using Windows Active Directory (which in the end is just a pimped LDAP server). This takes a day to setup a similar environment. Of course, you do not have the same granularity of configuration options, but it works quite nicely out of the box. This led me to the impression that even though Linux is very nice, stable, configurable and using all the OSS servers, it was in fact Microsoft who took these open technologies and turned them into an all-integrated environment. Note: I am aware of the similar attempts like SuSe Enterprise and several Ubuntu-based distributions that provide similar out of the box functionality. However, that was 2006/2007, Microsoft did that trick in 2000 and is currently 8 year ahead in development.