Re:Look like windows? (Score 1)

In principle, I agree with this statement. However, given that the primary Windows UI is a GUI, I find it difficult to see how something can 'look' like Windows but somehow operate differently. As for Linux "winning" customers, there are two major fronts on which Linux has to make large strides for that to happen. The first is the user experience in terms of running applications. Things like GNOME, KDE (and now apparently BlueCurve) are making some headway on that front, but they still have a long way to go to catch up with Windows. Hopefully they will learn from Windows and avoid some of the pitfalls that MS discovered, but it will take a while to get them up to the level that common, everyday users are use to. The second front is IT. While everyone may have their favorite Windows horror story, the fact remains that Windows makes managing ones computer hardware sufficiently easy that the common, everyday user can actually install Windows on their computer, add/remove hardware and perform similiar types of activities with a fairly high degree of confidence that the system will work sufficiently well afterwards to meet their needs. My mom can, and does, make these sort of changes with her Windows machine (not that mom isn't bright, but she is not a computer geek). Linux cannot make that claim. While some small amount of progress has been made along these lines, it is still the case that I periodically find that to get hardware X to work, I have to rebuild my kernel or perform some other sort of obscure operation *my most recent experience with this was trying to get the lm_sensors package installed - I had to have a configured source tree for my kernel in order to recompile things). The moment that one has to start recompiling things to get a piece of hardware to work, you've just barred 85+% of the population from using that hardware. Heck, even changing which controllers one's hard drives are one has to be done carefully or Linux won't find the proper drives afterwards. With Windows, I can move the harddrives around, add/remove controllers and so forth 'til the cows come home and it just works. This will be a *much* more difficult challenge for Linux. As far as I can tell, solving these sorts of problems will require making some fundemental changes in how the Linux kernel interacts with drivers which is not a change to be taken lightly.