[RussP]

The faster we rid ourselves of the Microsoft tax, the better.

To give you an idea of how easy Linux is to use these days, I put it on my MacBook Pro, and I find it easier to use than Mac OS.

The only impediments to widespread adoption of Linux at this point are 1) familiarity with Windows and 2) the fact that most computers still ship with Windows by default. As soon as Dell and others start offering Linux pre-installed on a large scale, that should change.

[JamesP81]

The only impediments to widespread adoption of Linux at this point are 1) familiarity with Windows and 2) the fact that most computers still ship with Windows by default. As soon as Dell and others start offering Linux pre-installed on a large scale, that should change.

Bzzt. Wrong. The reason Linux isn't being adopted is because the software people want and need to use doesn't run on it. I've used OpenOffice. It's supposedly compatible with MS Office. This is being charitable. As long as we're talking simple documents, it does well, but I've seen it fall flat on its ass doing the conversions more than once. Not to mention that none of the entertainment titles I indulge in from time to time are written for Linux. And I'm certainly not going to re-buy them even if they were written for Linux.

[stuartcr]

I think a big reason is that the majority of regular people that use computers at work, use windows, and that is what they want at home. Most people do not want to learn anything new, and their home computer just isn’t a big part of their lives.

[sionnsar]

There is another issue -- documentation. Not that everything Windows is great (back in the 80s/90s I knew a fellow who wrote books that were the user manual Microsoft should have been writing), but the documentation is sometimes absent, sometimes misleading.

That said there are user forums (too many of them, it sometimes seems) for help. Last week I had done something that caused the quote key to misfunction under Xubuntu (but Kubuntu was fine!). I finally found a thread where somebody had the exact same problem and the fix was simple -- change the "keyboard layout" to "us (default)".

Now if only I could get Adobe Flash to work. Haven't found the fix for that yet...

Been playing with Linux since '98, made the complete switch 2+ years ago.

[antiRepublicrat]

The faster we rid ourselves of the Microsoft tax, the better.

The "Microsoft tax" is pretty much dead with the wide availability of OEM Linux systems.