> "He wanted walls" which, factually and historically, don't work. Not to mention, the designs he approved were even likely to ever work.

Somebody should let Nancy Pelosi know...

You can pick up an 1watt fm transmitter for $30-40(US) and hook it up to the sound card of your music server.

Put cheap fm radios in every room of the house. You can control the music from your phone and the whole setup can be done for about $100, less if you have old fm radios lying around.

I did this for years because we moved around quite a bit and it works fine.

Naturally, the better the radio, the better the sound, but if you want whole house audio, it's the cheapest option.

1watt is the largest transmitter you can get without an FCC license and it'll stretch out into the yard, which is nice if you BBQ very often.

This is simply not true.

Average consumer purchases a Desktop from commercial retail store and it comes pre-installed with a version of Windows. This average consumer will not change the operating system for any reason. If it doesn't work, they'll call family tech-support. If it still can't be fixed, they'll take it in to a computer repair shop.

There isn't any compelling reason for a user of a pre-installed Windows computer to switch their operating system. The entire culture and market practically demands you have access to a Microsoft-operated PC, and Microsoft software.

Even if a linux distro had a completely identical UI, and it was binary compatible with Windows, what would be the point of switching operating systems (why go through all that work when it's exactly the same as what they already have)?

I run Linux on the desktop, have for over a decade. It's my primary OS, but you're just not going to get current Windows users to switch. The best chance Linux-as-desktop has of going mainstream is if Steam follows through with switching to Linux: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Linux-Steam-Ubuntu-Native-Support,15444.html