Red Hat as a commercial product is far from free (unless you mean free as in freedom) but it is openSource and CentOS is very free (free as in beer).

hashed with a random salt, although this can still be brute forced it is just much more expensive for all passwords not just the complex ones.

Oh, and also most games from gog.com will run fine in wine.

Try installing and configuring the 3D acceleration for Virtualbox via the settings and virtiualbox add-on's. Also make sure you have given the VM sufficient video memory.

For a desktop sure, but for a laptop your options are much more limited. You can get something from Zareason , system76, or one of a few Dell's but other than that you are pretty much stuck. I had to grab an Asus laptop from Best Buy (shudder) last year because mine died 2 days before I was leaving the country so I didn't have much choice other than buy one that had mostly Intel parts so I would have a fair chance of it working with Ubuntu. I tried getting a refund from Asus but it fell on deaf ears.

You wouldn't have the money to patent it or to defend the patent. Once you try and defend your patent MegaCorp Y is going to counter sue for all you have and you will not be able to afford the mounting legal costs and now you lost your home.

I wish I had points to give you, sharepoint is painful. Also the most useful features only work on IE with Windows.

Sounds like you should switch to Linux. It can be as much or as little as you want it to be.

This is true, I wish we could buy machines without a Microsoft tax. But anyway, I think that Microsoft is going to start losing more and more ground on the consumer front to tablets and cell phones. My wife doesn't even touch her laptop anymore and most people can replace their casual surfing and email with a tablet pretty easily. For the few times when you need to write a term paper you can use a desktop. A few weeks ago I went to an event at Google and out of about 100 people with laptops I saw 1 or two Windows laptops the rest were either MacBook pro's pr MacBook Air's. In the enterprise MS still has a lock on the desktop and for the most part email servers but things can change, just take a look at RIM.

Valve will be soon, I am not sure when but all signs point to something coming out in the next year.

I think you are a bit optimistic with the "no issues" but things have gotten a lot better since I started using Linux with Ubuntu 7.04. Every laptop I have installed on has had some minor issue at least. It is not an issue anymore now that we have the BumbleBee project but before that you didn't really have any choices for Optimus enabled laptops. With that said, the main reason you won't see GNU/Linux take off on the desktop is because companies like Dell, HP, ASUS, and Lenovo are not pushing Linux machines. Most people will not go out of the way to install a new OS on their machine even if that new OS is just an upgrade to Windows. I think we are more likely to see some sort of Android/Linux take over the home desktop market as the lines between mobile and PC get more blurred. Also Google didn't choose Linux just because it was free they choose it because it is a very good kernel. What else would they have chosen?

What I meant to say was that typically only two previous models of a given device will receive the update I am a bit surprised that the iPhone 3S will get the update since it will probably have a less than stellar experience, also I wouldn't really say they are full updates since Apple tends to leave key feature out on the older devices even though they should be able to use them (Siri). A lot of Android devices don't get updated because they are CCC or their specs are too low. Are you going to complain that you can't run Windows7 on your little 1.6 GHz Atom netbook that has 512MB of RAM? Anyway I pointed out Samsung before since they are now trying to focus on fewer models with more consistent branding and experience worldwide. That way they can release updates in a timely manner. They have done fairly well updating the Galaxy S2 although my Japanese one has yet to receive ICS it has received 3-4 updates in the last year and I am pretty sure it is the carrier that is being slow to release ICS.

That's not what the market is showing. Android adoption is growing and growing and for the average person they don't really care or know how the versions are different. They only care if they can do instagram, facebook, and Angry Birds. Those of us who really do care won't wait and will upgrade manually by some other method.

Microsoft hasn't exactly had a stellar upgrade history so far .... Apple sure bot they really only push updates to 2 models and everything else gets left behind so it is easy for them.

It is my hardware I want to do what I like with it. I don't mind so much if the carriers are slow to roll out updates if I can do it myself. It may not have matter to people who don't know what it is but you will get a lot of support from the people who do know what it is.