Red Hat, Suse, and others have made a name for themselves in the enterprise server space; perhaps somebody like PCLinuxOS might do the same now for the desktop. Once corporate users start using Linux on the desktop, they’ll want it at home. That was Microsoft’s original marketing scheme, and it worked admirably as an underground way into the Enterprise (MS is nothing if not a marketing company; one ad campaign by Apple doesn’t make them a marketing powerhouse!). Linux evangelism works best when spread at the grassroots level, which fits in well with an ‘underground’ approach to getting an Enterprise desktop Linux.

As U mentioned, fonts and rendering play a big part in how a platform is perceived. Like it or not, computers are everywhere, and 95% of the users have little knowledge of what’s under the hood. To make an analogy, a ‘geek’ is like a ‘motorhead’ of the 1950s and 1960s. The motorhead went home after work and tinkered with the engine in his race car every night, taking her to the track on weekends to race other motorheads; the majority of car owners, OTOH, used their cars to get from A to B with little or no knowledge of how it worked. The motorhead cared greatly about the efficiency of his engine, transmission, tires, and other elements of the powertrain, but the majority wanted a ‘living-room-on-wheels,’ and cared very little about the powertrain. In a similar fashion, Linux geeks want a smoothly-operating, secure system that works well, but Microsoft delivers a pretty system that awes the masses, most of whom don’t know or care how their computer works, and most of whom have not even heard of Linux, let alone know anything about it. Apple delivers an even prettier system, and although it works very well (and usually securely, thanks to BSD Unix), it only comes at a price (not just monetary). ‘Pretty’ will win the marketing war almost every time, even in the face of repeated security blunders.

Bottom line: There’s room for somebody to start making money selling a ‘pretty’ version of Linux!

Vista will have multiple service packs applied in the years to come, and with each will come some performance optimisation. XP used to crash often in the first year or two of it’s life.

The nice features of Vista are late in arriving. In industry, where many of the computers are destined, SaaS is taking over. SaaS is Software as a service. The need for companies to purchase big servers for their business systems is disappearing. The browser (firefox, Opera, Explorer, etc) will be the interface to the application. Networking allows the application to reside anywhere. Networking allows part of an application to be accessed from your own computer, and another part from another continent, while a third part from your ISP. Powerful desktops are essentially required to run the browsers.

Vista will take a few years to be where XP is today. Hopefully Linux will have made sufficient advances to match what Vista has introduced as ideas for friendly desktop computing.. Even though today the tendency is to have a low low cost laptop with no hard disk and only flash memory. The software in these machines must have low footprints, eliminating the possibility of Vista to be installed thereon.