I've said this many times before that MS is still the better OS in terms of ease of use and software availablility. If Linux really wants to compete they need to seriously address their 'dependency' issues. If they do not, then MS will continue to totally dominate the PC operating system market.
Don't know for sure- it can't be Longhorn since it's not yet on the market. I hear from users of OS's newer than mine ( Win2000 ) that they pay an annual fee, or get limited numbers of re-installs, or that if you swap cards or internal parts, you get grief from the OS. It just sounds like too much unnecessary hassle to me.
You have a good point about Linux- my first experience with the SUSE release was so annoying enough that I sent it back for a refund. Tried Mandrake 9, and between the wife giving me grief ( My files! Where are my Files? ) and lightning killing the modem, the new modem not being recognized by Linux, and the fonts being too small for these old eyes to see well, I just gave up on it. I put the two home PC's behind a hardware firewall and that stopped the virus/highjacker problems, so I lost my main motivation for switching.
Linux needs to do two things to be ready for prime time- be as easy to install as Windows ( pop in a CD, and follow the prompts ), and be able to work easily with Windows applications. A lot of people- like my wife- bring home tons of stuff from work, and they need to be able to use work with it without jumping through hoops.
I'm not particularly partisan about operating systems- I use Win2000 because it does what I want to do mostly well, and was fairly cheap to upgrade from Win95/98. But if they make it too expensive, or too annoying, to use I will certainly look elsewhere again.