well as any one can see people are producing distros after distro and really its all the same thing i mean we all see most of the same packages bundled up and bla bla i think linux in general needs somthing ground breaking i mean look as m$ and the improvements they made from 95 to xp when ya had 95,98,me your would get blue screen after blue screen lol and they fixed that up among other things but linux i don't know all i see is the same packages bundled up and just slapped with a new trendy name heh how about your opinion?

So the ground breaking improvements in windows are fixing some of the bugs? They went from 3.1 to 95 and introduced a lot of bugs. They repackaged 95 with some bug fixes as 98, and charged new price, but it was buggy, so they brought out the 98se version and charged for it and it was a bit better, but then they charged a shitload for ME and it was worse, so then they decided they couldn't fix it that way so they stuck the ME interface on win 2000 and made it more buggy than 2000 and charged a shitload of money, but it was still a security nightmare with some less crashes, but still more than the NT series. With the SP2 we wait and see, but at least it was the first free bug fix in a while...

Meanwhile linux has not made these groundbreaking advances since it didn't have these crashes to fix? I miss the logic here? Linux has, on the other hand, catch up to win in many areas and has been way ahead for years in other areas, mostly security and stability - which is why we use it primarily...

I don't suppose you were using linux in the win 3.1 and 95 days? I think there has been some major improvement since then - without the crashes...

what you see in front of your face is not nearly so important as what's happening under the surface. Many of the improvements in individual distros are in places a lot of people don't even think about....making a prettier interface isn't one of the major improvements, and since stability has always been there you don't often notice it not crashing.

A prettier face is pitifully better for sales to the simple minded consumer, so is preinstalled Os's

That said, Linux Desktops are so way beyond cool, that Windows will need a long time to get there.

I am sooooooo endlessly bored with the Windows look ..

Trolls will be Trolls

heh but what makes it cool?

That depends entirely on your definition of "cool".
For me, if a system allows me to make whatever changes I want, that's cool. If I'm not forced to do things in a particular way, that's cool. If I can run my box for months at a time without ever seeing a crash or freeze, that's cool. If I'm not infected with advertisments and data miners without my consent, that's cool.
If I'm not constantly reminded that I'm a "customer" and the "product" I'm using is not mine...that's cool.

yea that does seem a bit nice

Not to mention compiling software for your actual machine, instead of just a package designed to half work on any x86 platform. It is why Linux packages are so much smaller (size) than their Windows competitors. It is much better to use Linux when you have a slow Internet connection.

The two major improvements in windows have been with windows 95 operation in 32 bit mode, and windows NT's move to a client/server model. Linux has both of these features to begin with.

The next big move will be to 64 bit which you can do on linux now, before Windows introduces Longhorn. Since Linux had already been ported to 64-bit platforms which existed before the new x86-64 bit chips existed, the introduction of 64-bit linux distro's by SuSE and Mandrake was made easier.

The other possible advancement with win win be the new winFS meta filesystem, which KDE and gnome are already dabbling with in user space and reiser4 is trying to handle at a filesystem level.

Let's not forget the use of Linux in very large clusters, which has been adopted by Animators, and agencies like NASA.

Why do we even have to ask about the next big thing? Windows: new improvements equals bloat! Linux: new improvements equals something better being made even better. Debian has apt-get what beats that? Slack can treat a tgz file as an executable what beats that? Open office is open source (free) ms word costs mega bucks and I think OO has office beat. I think the great thing about linux is it has users that are happy with the way things run from the word go, its faster then windows, more flexible then windows, more stable then windows, more versatile then windows, what more could a person ask for? I could sit here and make assumptions about the next big thing, but I would rather be wowed when something does come along.

How long have you been using Linux anyway?
I have seen tons of changes and improvements since I first started using it.
Of course distributions offer different variations on the same packages. The packages that are available are the packages that are available.
I have seen Linux go from not supporting my video out of the box to always supporting my video out of the box. I have seen the win(lin)-modem support get much better, I have seen USB support become better, I have seen changes and improvements in big apps like KDE and Open Office, I have seen new programs like Evolution introduced, I have seen the Knoppix live CD succeed (even though it was not the first live CD), I have seen the Codeweaver Crossover pluggin/office introduced, journeled filesystems becoming common, and etc....
Linux improvements happen in a different way than Windows. Every program and distribution makes changes in whatever timeframe it does. There is not a huge change every 5 years (or whatever).

And GIMP and Openoffice make Linux now useable really also in day to day affairs. All that is needed now is that Games Publishers develop also for Linux. Aka Battlefield Vietnam, Doom3 and so on. I pityfully can't see that happen, for a while. So Windows is essentially an X-Box for me .

I second that! Linux has improved greatly over the last four years. I can guarantee you that!