Upgrading to XP

[LuCiFeR[SD]]

What Linux needs in some massive company with unlimited funds to take over the whole project and standardise the whole thing and then re-release it in just a couple of flavours, something like...

Linux Home Basic
Linux Home Premium
Linux Business
Linux Ultimate

Trouble is they would probably start charging the earth for it!

Every distribution already does something similar. You'll have a desktop edition and a server edition. Who needs more than that?

Now, I am a HUGE Linux fan, it is getting better every time it gets a major update. If I went 100% Linux tomorrow, I wouldn't loose any sleep over it apart from not being able to play a few games, but I know that I could get at least 60% of my current windows software to run using Wine... Probably more if I REALLY tried hard!

Compared with just 2 years ago, pretty much every distro has come on in leaps and bounds.

A small example.

Getting printers to work 2 years ago was pretty hit and miss... but now, ALL of my HP printers from laser to all in one Scanner/fax/copier type things are detected and installed with NO problems at all.

My cable modem, worked straight away, USB or network port. No farting around.

hell, I even set up an old PC I had kicking around (a P-III 733 384mb ram), installed 2 network cards and made it my firewall/router/dhcp server. It controls and protects my whole network from the outside world. And believe me, I have quite an interesting network lol. I have an old Xbox as a Linux box and that was quite a fun project. Well it cost me £20 and is hooked up to the TV downstairs, just so the wife can surf the Internet/email without having yet another PC in the house lol.

I guess the moral of this story is this, Linux has a steep learning curve, but the satisfaction you get from making it do what you want it to do is so damn rewarding .

But getting back on topic after all my bragging (hehehe) It would be good to have, say, a council dedicated to unifying each distributions folder structure and making sure everything has it's proper place and making them conform. Other than that, I quite like the 1000 ways to skin a cat attitude of the open source arena, it gives you a lot of freedom

[Derek]

Yeah, I like open source too, there are a lot of clever people who can contribute who don't actually work in the industry and open source kind of gives them a chance to do their thing.

Btw, my post above was a bit of a dig at Microsoft in case you didn't get it.

[LuCiFeR[SD]]

I did guess Derek, don't worry LOL

[dna]

I think you're right about the downgrade issue however, it is still a good idea.

Actually, it might be better to eventually move over to linux since the file compatiblity issues are nearly nill as of right now.

Also, with linux, or Free BSD, there are very few security issues.