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Heh, that's where I got it. Glad to be talking to a fellow techie.

Honestly, I think MS is on it's path to swifly lose userbase.(marketshare is a different story) They keep treating security as a feature. It's not a feature, it's a process. As things keep building up.... Hp is starting to offer linux in the non-server space for example.(laptops) The biggest hurdle is getting at least one linux box into the mainstream.(your circuit city's, best buy's, and so on) Not only that, but users of older machines who want to end their problems with spywares are a natural fit for free software. Linux is lighter in weight than windows as a general rule of thumb.

It'll be a while before(if) Linux surpasses the mac on the desktop as the #2 OS in the USA, but worldwide the mac is #3. Between the sheer numbers of machines around and the free nature this was bound to happen.

Heh, that's where I got it. Glad to be talking to a fellow techie.

Well, don't be too glad, if you're an OSNews fan: IMO, that site's really gone downhill in the last year, and you just need to read the comments on the "Mozilla staffer blogs about Linux's problems" article from a few days back to see why. It's like Slashdot with a fraction of the userbase and a less painful design.

They keep treating security as a feature. It's not a feature, it's a process.

Pretty much. They've got no clue about security, and the fact that they designed Windows to perform in a trusted computing environment speaks volumes. Apple is on the ball as far as OS security goes, IMO: its temp-admin priveleges system and password generation are two aces in the hole.

The biggest hurdle is getting at least one linux box into the mainstream.(your circuit city's, best buy's, and so on)

IIRC, some retailers tried selling Linux machines, and they flopped. A big problem is Linux's half-baked status: KDE and Gnome are absolutely terrible, and beyond that, it's daunting to switch from Windows to anything else. OS X is at least relatively recognizable in terms of GUI design, and the biggest hurdle will be overcoming the sense that everything is backwards (taskbar on top, minimize/maximize/close buttons on the left side, default desktop icons on the right side, etc)

Between the sheer numbers of machines around and the free nature this was bound to happen.

That and OS X apparently isn't as good a server as Linux (which IMO isn't as good as FreeBSD for that purpose.) Apple has a great home/workstation OS on their hands, at least. It's the reverse of Linux's situation.