Now days with all the pretty, out-of-the-box ubuntu distros like HH its pretty easy to become a linux user. Have you ever chucked an old version of OpenBSD on your comp? - it takes a week to get it working :P. Kids could easily be using ubuntu for word processing and googling. And if more people are at least aware of Linux, perhaps another 1% of socially-retarded people will discover that there is something more fun out there then dungeons and dragons. At least that will bring us up to 2% of the population. :)

FAT is useless as a hard disk file system because of fragmentation etc. So, why use it in a mobile device?? because the decision on where to read/write memory from/to is implemented in hardware for most portable devices. The eePC has solid state and uses the Linux ext3 journaling system. Runs perfectly fast. The is no benefit for using FAT anywhere! Anyway in regards to Micro$oft and their patents. They can monopolize business entities, but their control of the users is slowly dissipating. Linux will rule the world within 5 years.