OSNews

Linux installs will supercede Windows in the corporate world not in 5 to 10 years but within 2 years at the outside. In the home user market add another year or two, max. That is the amount of time it will take for retailers to preinstall linux in lieu of MS Windows, but preinstalls are not a problem in the corporate sector where an IT staff can install over a network or use disk images for the rollout of thousands of linux desktops at no more cost than is required to configure a single desktop.

You say that linux is not a Windows killer but it is. The deciding factor is cost. And the linux desktop is much nicer than Windows overall - much more versatile, powerful and customizable and much, much prettier. Then you complain about apps. MS Office suffers from the same problems that Windows in general suffers from. Bloat and bugs, with no serious effort on the part of MS to change the situation. MS Windows installations (all versions therof, including XP) suffer from deterioration within a matter of months. Swapfile corruption and fragmentation and registry corruption require reboots and reinstalls across the board. Viruses, trojans, and instability plague Microsoft servers to the point Microsoft Windows isn't even considered for mission critical applications and services in the corporate world. MS has already lost to Linux, decisively, in the corporate server market.

Both Gnome and Kde are looking very good. Both are superior to Microsoft's explorer.exe. Don't worry, games and commercial apps will be ported from Windows to Linux in quantity within the next two years. Within two years MS Windows will no longer be the chosen platform for game development or shrink-wrap consumer oriented commercial software. Linux will be. That's two years, not ten.

Even in the one area in which MS has been innovative, building on the good things about java while discarding most of java's negatives, Microsoft's .NET is already being superceded by a free and open equivalent, mono. Mono is multi-platform and already supports both Qt and Gtk. It's not a finished product by any means but it has a great future. .NET has no future because it is tied to the MS platform and MS has no future.

Microsoft is finished. I'm disgusted by the number of Microsoft apologists who participate in this forum who should know better. The US economy and worldwide economy can only be helped by the demise of MS, the sooner the better. Perhaps your careers won't be helped by the same. Why not be honest about the situation, astroturfers!

People *do* have compelling reasons not to use Windows. Cost, insecurity, instability and Microsoft's increasingly exploitative licensing policies, invasion of privacy and disrespect for the data of its customers. If you think Joe User doesn't care about these things you are very mistaken. Joe User has no vested interest in MS. Corporations fighting desparately to survive and governments in need of affordable IT solutions have even less of an interest in apologizing for Microsoft or continuing to support its exploitation of themselves than Joe User does. The tide has turned, any you will be shocked at how quickly the majority of the computer using world can pull the chain and flush the filth that is MS Windows down the toilet.