I'm not sure you understand what an IDE is. GoLive and Dreamweaver are not IDEs. An IDE, or Integrated Development Environment, needs to have, among other things, a compiler/interpreter and debugger: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_development_environment Eclipse is an IDE, VisualStudio and XCode are also IDEs. They are generally used by developers, and any good web developer in this day and age is typically staring at either CSS, Markup, or Code of some sort. Designers clearly need a different environment. But for a good developer, writing the markup should be the easy part. Manipulating it reliably across environments, managing state, etc should be the hard nuts to crack. And notepad is not superior to a good IDE. A GOOD text editor (which notepad is not) is not superior to a good IDE. But I would certainly rather have VIM or TextMate or NotePad++ than plain old notebook if I can't have a decent IDE.

I think we are already seeing where the success of desktop linux will come from, and its affordability. Those cheap Wallmart PCs, the EEEPC, the XO, all point the way to where success will come for linux. Right now, from a hardware perspective, there isn't much driving the need for beefier hardware from a consumer perspective besides memory-hungry OSs. The average user wants to surf the web, watch video, and do some word processing. That's about it, and they don't need eight cores and sixteen gigs of RAM to do it. I'm old enough to remember the days when the Commodore 64 DESTROYED the (then hardly ubiquitous) IBM in sales by creating a $250 computer that you could take home and just plug in and go. The fact that you can build a very usable, snappy system with linux on a quarter of the hardware that you need to just make Vista run is going to be very attractive to a certain segment of the consumer world that are not already linux users. And, this, in turn is going to provide a user base that can propell the system forward. System manufacturers seem to be figuring this out, with more and more of these systems, like the new Shuttle KPC, targeting this market.

Really? April 19. STFU.