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.
I have WinXP, Win2k, .Net and Win 2003 installed on different PC's and don't have this issue. I think this may not be true.
between the wife giving me grief ( My files! Where are my Files? )
My wife had a similar problem, her law firm used Word Perfect and my PC only had MS-Word. Drove her crazy until they got rid of Word Perfect.
There are several distros that are easier to install than Windows--and it'll take less time.
OpenOffice.org will read and write MS Office files. GIMP works with just about any type of pic, and there are several sound mixing apps as well.
Check out my home page for a link to Windows-to-Linux apps equivalents.
bh, just so you know this is more of a distro thing than a 'linux' thing.. Fedora, and I think Suse do this, insert a cd it automounts and opens a windows (using gnome or kde), click on the RPM and it will install and auto-resolve deps. The trick is this, it has to know where the deps are so its best to use a yum repository like dag (which has the app and all deps) and a gui app like GYUM to install software. Non of this fixes the lack of some softwre people prefer to have..
As for the install itself Fedora and Redhat have been there for years, all have a a gui with default buttons for a base desktop install..
I honestly believe the only reason we haven't long-since made the switch to Linux company wide was that the beancounters outsourced our IT support to an MS-only shop as a "cost savings". This was done by the same group that mandated secretaries and engineers got identical systems and couldn't understand why anyone would ever need anything more than the MS Office suite.
The stories I could tell...
They never will, so long as they require you to know your particular hardware settings and addresses. Then having to "mount drives" and determining partition sizes. I could do it, but I don't have time to hassle with it.