For over a decade Linux has been sitting at the precipice of Victory, finally a viable and fitting alternative to that awful Redmond, WA based juggernaut.
Um, well, I thought so at Mandrake 7.0, then 8.0, then I sort of moved back to Windows (okay I never moved away, I admit it) because of all silly and selfish reasons, I wanted to be able to print a document. Yep, that was what drove me away from Linux and back into the filthy clutches of thy cyborg we know and love as Bill Gates (imagine the image of Bill Gates at Slash Dot right now).
So now Linux can print, even read thumb drives, and if you know how to hack it or if you have just the right installation you can even play HD Movies.
Point being is that it is still just a side show. There are the voisterous children (yeah, of all ages) who go on and on about how they dumped Windows, but they don't tell you about what they either didn't need that Windows does provide to many users and/or what struggles they had to endure to save that average annual cost of about $60 for an OS.
$60 is based on what it would cost to upgrade every three or four years, perhaps for some like me it is lower, but that is a safe ball-park-like number.
I spend $60 a month of fast food - a month! Wow, but I cannot imagine being so damned cheap as to limit the usefulness of this modern appliance we know as a personal computer just to avoid MS getting a small chunk of change from me.
That doesn't even begin to scratch the surface on why business doesn't want to embrace Linux (well business does but it cannot afford the high cost of Linux....yep, you read that right, the high cost of Linux).
So my final thought is a question, does a face lift really do squat to improve the viability of Ubuntu or any of the other myriad flavors/versions/distros of Linux?
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