but while i would never tell an organization to rewrite or phase out technologies that are doing what they intended to do, i would inquire as to whether having a single platform strategy is likely to be beneficial over the long term, and if not whether future investments should be more agnostic in their design.

rick: good points all around, and if XP works for you i’d be the first to say: great, keep using it. but i would say that there are compelling reasons to use Linux in some situations. i, for example, use it because it’s possible to tweak the desktop in precisely the manner i want. for some of my friends, however, the compelling use case would be security - they’re innundated by trojans and spyware that Linux is at least currently immune to.

the point is that everyone’s got different needs and wants. for some it might be security, for others it might be eye candy, for others it might be application availability, and still others all of the above.

my contention is not that Linux is or can be anytime soon all things to all people. what it can be, however, is a decent choice for an increasing number of users - and that’s definitely new.

Dan: given that it’s VB rather than .NET, i’m not sure emulation - mainsoft or otherwise - is a terrific option. good thought, thought.

Luis: agreed. data portability is one of the impediments to me switching friends and family away from Windows. they’d be fine with it in most respects, and i’m sure as hell sick of patching and cleaning their machines, but it would take forever to get the data they need over.

rmc: it certainly is, and in a case like yours as with mgm above i’d concur that migration makes little sense. as above, however, i’d question that level of dependence more carefully if i was in your spot, however. it’s not that you should switch from Windows - if it works well for you, then continue using it. but to not have the ability to seems to be slightly problematic from where i sit.

i read that lenovo are bundling SLES 10. it works, out of the box. that’s what we get with wintel. it will help adoption, but unless your apps are available, linux is a no-go.

if the industry moves to .net, and Mono keeps up with M$, then that may help adoption in the application space. But don’t bet on that any time soon.

this is just an example, but it’s bound to be common experience with the penetration of windows.

The frustrating things is that is the only major thing that didn’t work - sleep worked fine once I set the preference correctly. Oh, and I needed to do a few tweaks to really get font rendering where it should be.

But the other, main reason I don’t switch? I have no compelling reason to. What will a Linux desktop give me that XP does not? Firefox? Thunderbird? Open Office? Nope, got those. AVG is lightweight enough that I don’t see a significant hit to performance. OK, I don’t get to play with shell scripting… but I don’t care. And I’m not political about my desktop… In fact, I lose a few things… Quickbooks, printing to my Canon printer (no Linux drivers… Bad Canon, bad!).

To get pas the audience that like to geek and/or that cares about the political philosophy of operating systems, Linux needs to give those of us willing to try it out some reason to switch. Even if it just worked, switching still takes an act of will - we have to decide it’s worth it. As much as I’d like to, I can’t come up with that reason at the present time.

Except for our 800 line of business applications that would have to be rewritten. Many of them are written in Visual Basic, Access or other Windows-based languages. There is no way our company could afford to rewrite all these applications from scratch.