That may well explain why it hasn't been done (successfully), but it isn't a good reason not to do it. Evolution is horrible on Windows and Thunderbird (while superior in my opinion) lacks certain functionality, OS integration, and provides a contrasting UI to the rest of any office suite.

I was being sarcastic while suggesting that doing things the simple way isn't how we operate around here.

Sad but true. Whenever a member of the silent majority ventures to speak out (on any issue, not just NN), the media steps into to generically label them as a zealot, terrorist, political rogue/dissident, loose cannon, or some other closed-minded activist bent on hindering progress before said sheep has a real chance to build support and amass like-minded supporters. I'm kinda ranting off-topic here, I know, but this does seem to be the current trend. American media --a revenue/data stream controlled by the rich-- acts as a sort of zeitgeist police keeping the silent majority, well, silent and carefully informed.

Sounds simple, and for that reason alone I oppose the notion with every fiber of my being (or lack of say/vote as the case may be).

you mean our plastic recycling bins?

Sure it is. We're not talking about bad roads, we talking about congested roads. If an automaker were to build a car but only allow it to run on certain roads (although it was fully capable of running on all roads), would you blame that on the DOT? Spread the traffic across multiple avenues, to be quite literal and metaphorical.

I'll agree it's a nice alternative to VMWare Workstation. But VMWare Server's 'boot guest OS on host OS startup' and being able to close the virtual machines window and have the OS continue running (i.e. run it in the background with no GUI) are great features that are missing in VirtualBox.

I'm an Ubuntu Edgy (now Feisty) user, and I can tell you first hand that after Synaptic does it's thing with online updates I am occasionally left with hardware that doesn't work correctly. I've had two systems onboard audio stop working altogether, my scroll wheel on my mouse quit working, my BlueTooth Logitech keyboard was no longer recognized automatically at boot time, my /boot was not longer recognized by grub on one occasion last week. I'd like to respond to several of the comments in one post as well.

1. Dell wouldn't help me get my Gigabit LAN card working with Ubuntu even though the card mfg said "supported with kernel 2.4.14 and higher". So they're no better than HP, but they did at least tell me they know nothing about Linux.
2. Even simple hardware support can be dropped following an online update
3. It's too expensive to have your tech support guys trained on multiple open-source OS's.
4. No Linux guru with the skills to troubleshoot OS/Hardware issues is going to work tech support, c'mon man