Exactly. If a company needs PCs for work, they can pay for a distro tailored to their needs, pay for support and end up with a better suited system, better reliability and get it all for a lot lower price. The same goes for anyone, paying for a distro is really paying for the support and in most cases it is a lot cheaper than anything MS has to offer.
Personally I prefere fiddling with things and getting everything just the way I want it (or sending it belly up trying), the learning experience is worth it. It didn't take long to feel insulted that MS had hidden so much from me and for no apparent reason. OK, put in all the fancy GUI's and wizards but the shell is the most important thing, if it's not there the thing might as well be a nintendo

You're trying to put Linux in a box, and it doesn't fit in a box.

Linux is not one way. It is many ways. Not all developers are unpaid. Not all distros cater to expert users. Not all distros cater to "the average user." Different distros have different foci. I see you're a Gentoo user. Well, Gentoo will probably never cater to average users. That's fine. Gentoo's entitled to remain that way.

But that doesn't stop Ubuntu from being "user-friendly." It doesn't stop Linspire, Mepis, and PCLinuxOS from also shooting for that goal.

Linux is not monolithic. It is dynamic and branching. That's the nature and beauty of open source.

Unless it's Novell Suse whereupon it comes in a box (soon to have a flying Windows logo in the corner no doubt).

Well ofcourse it fits. You sell some specific easy-to-use distro in a box and offer like 90 days unlimited start support and manual. Exactly like for Vista. Customer pays for the small ticket with support number in it and the copyrighted manual, not for the Linux.

I see a serious market there. Especially if you scrap the clumsy start-menu thinking and move to this millenia with that distro. Microsoft self will scrap start-menu when Windows "Vienna" comes.

Vienna. That the place with water for foundations? And can anyone tell me if MS have got rid of defrags with this release?
As for linux in a box, the road has many paths and that is surely one of them.
Cheers

I think so. The anticipated WinFS should fix fragissues. It was planned for Vista but meh, didn't happen. Gonna be in Vienna, otherwise I can but wonder.

@Grife:
Concerning your signature:
I never heard of Window maker before, so I went to their website.
And it seems that Window Maker is an "X Window manager" which supports the "desktop environments" Gnome and KDE.
So how can you compare them?
And I failed to see what exactly makes Window maker so great, but it's probably because I haven't tried it out yet.

I also never understood what makes KDE so great, but now I've been using KDE for one week at work (having only used Gnome before on my personal laptop) and I was amazed by all the features available in KDE (even though most of them were from apps like Konsole, Kate and Konqueror).
The possibility to have multiple wallpapers, keyboard shortcuts extremly easy to configure...
And nice bouncing icons while loading. ^^
Now I installed KDE and XFCE on my laptop with Ubuntu, but I think in the end, I'll stay with KDE.
My greatest dicoveries were Konsole (multitab console! and personalized sessions!) and Kate (terminal inside the text editor(which goes automatically to the directory of the file)!+horizontal or vertical split! and multitab like in gedit, altough less evident).
I know they also work in gnome, but I never found them there by default.


And I don't know if Beryl (X Window manager+Compositing manager) can work with Window Maker, but for me the window manager of the next millenia for Linux is Beryl.
(I only still need to get it to work on Ubuntu Feisty...)
Scale/Expose is a must for any modern OS!

The lack of general knowledge is scary ...

The "the place with water for foundations" is Venice, Italy;
Vienna is the capital of Austria. Oh, sorry, both aren't in
the USA ...


Cheers,
Tink

Originally posted by Tinkster:
Ouch, that must have stung (I love it)

Please don't quote me out of context. I wasn't talking about a physical box. I was talking about a figurative (abstract) box--meaning that Linux can be only one thing (consumer/commercial or elitist/developer-friendly).

The scary thing is that he says he's from Ireland.
Of course there's no way for me to check that.


Cheers,
Tink

Sniped!! and by an LQ mod!! the officialdom are out to get me So this windows Venice thing will be the one that does all the stuff longhorn was going to do? or was that Cairo, I forget.
And I know that place is in Arizona
Cheers,
Stan

Unix is better. So is Sun Solaris and a pocket calculator

Never seen a blue screen of death on a toaster either

I'm no expert. But having used both I've come to an affinity for both. They each have good points. Oddly enough, if MS wasn't as big as it is I don't think the internet would be as big as it is. And without all of that in place, I don't think Linux would have grown so much over the years.

As for "Bill Gates is evil", well that may or may not be true. But if we focus on bringing Linux to the moms & dads of the world, then maybe one day we'll have a world w/o an OS which just can't seem to become secure and so on.