I'm a big fan of Linux. However, I think all of us reading this are developers or power users. Windows is still much easier for the average desktop user. As an example, I just added a hard disk to a Fedora 7 system. The various desktop environments are not really very integrated to the OS. To do this kind of upgrade the user must go to a terminal window and type fdisk and mkfs commands, and edit /etc/fstab with the editor of his/her choice. Adding hard disks to Windows systems is much easier. »

I think the coment "We've gone from a sparse and user unfriendly desktop to pretty awesome desktop environments like GNOME, KDE, Xfce, and (if it's ever finished) Enlightenment" points out one of the biggest problems with widespread adoption of Linux for the desktop. Most users don't want to choose their desktop environment independent of their OS. You could have 20 computers in an office all with different configurations of Linux. It would be more difficult for users to switch between different Linux configurations than computers running Windows 2000, XP, and Vista. It would be better for Linux if many of these projects such as KDE and GNOME could merge into one keeping the best features of each. Don »