What can't Linux do?
 

Is there anything Linux can't do that Windows can? I'm not talking about legal issues, just raw possibility.

Linux can't crash :)

j/k

IMHO I think Linux can do just about anything, so I'm just going to go with "no".

It doesn't have full support for as many hardware devices. A few things like horrible true transparency support. For the most part yes linux can.

I still use windows for greeting cards, buisness cards and such. I've yet to find a really friendly app for linux for these few things. I use the printmaster suite, it's really friendly, and my wife likes it.

It's not a big thing in my book, and I haven't searched for any publishing apps in quite some time, so there could be a better app for that as of this writing.

It doesn't bother me much, because I have two mixed networks that I must maintain and stay sharp with the windows side as well as the linux side.
good luck.

DirectX based games are only really supported if you use (pay for) Cedega. OpenGL based games and native ones work a lot better. :)

I doubt that this belongs to this particular forum.

Never the less i will try to answer: your question is really too broad, generally quetioning 'what linux cannot do' is incorrect. Of course the answer is linux can do everything. which makes the inital question pointless. Its like asking what Mac OS cannot do vs windows.

The correct question to ask is what can linux do efficiently and what it cannot do efficiently vs Windows?

We'll here's the short list from the top of my head:

Good:
Linux is stable
Makes a good server platform
Does not need powerful hardware to run well
Efficient
Has large program library of which majority is free and often are as good, if not better, as their windows counterparts
Much better security

Bad things:
No standards really, every distro has its own and can put things in differernt places
Fairly bad game support
No good configuration gui to speak of.
Some things are hard to accomplish (mostly relates to absence of good gui)

hard to acomplish is not the same as cannot acomplish however; in terms of raw technicalities there's very little it cannot do if you have the patience to get things working how you want them.

right now on the top of "want to work but haven't managed it yet" list is getting my wireless network working, I can get it working without security modes, but trying to get it to work with WPA-PSK just gives me headaches.

Ror: remember that encription is accomplished via windows drivers most of the time, thus without proper linux driver API getting wpa-psk to work on linux box might be impossible.

I've found both a supplicant for ndiswrapper and found native linux drivers that claim to work with WPA-PSK but I'll be dammed if I can get them to work right :)

Mikhail_16: Just because I got a certain answer to my question, doesn't mean I asked it incorectly. I was actually looking (and hoping) for you initial answer that there isn't anything Linux can't do. I was talking about anything. Like ror said, "hard to acomplish is not the same as cannot acomplish". I was intentionally being very technical. I guess I was not eliminating something just because it hadn't been done yet, only if someone had proven that it would never be possible to happen on linux just because of programming. Sorry if my technicality pisses you off, if there's one thing all my friends hate about me, it's the fact that I'm always looking at something literally instead of the way they want me to. Thanks to all who replied.

Been using Linux now for six months exclusively. Started with FC2, went to SuSE but now back with FC2. Used Linux and Winblows combination for about a year, then after the last crash of Winblows about six months i moved to Linux for good.

Have not found anything that i cant do with it. I love it. I have found a replacement for everything i would use in business and personal life. Finally started compiling my own programs now, like QCAD.

As for people complaining about games, GO TAKE A FLYING HIKE. Games are for gaming consoles, computers are for work in my opinion.

Oh, you are not pissing me off in the least. And if for some reason you got that impression from my post, then i opologize for the improper wording of it.

Although i fail to understand how your question is actually techical when its not asking anything technical and relates more towards the philosophical musings about linux as a platform in general.

It wasn't the wording of your post, it was the wording of mine that I was woried wether it was... provocative I guess is the word I'm looking for. I guess I'm parinoid from always being around people who hate me being literal. I didn't mean technical as in refering to technology, I meant it as well..... on the location tab to the left, some people put Earth and while that is technically correct, it isn't the answer that some people are expecting there. Maybe I'm misspelling technically, I suck at spelling. WTF, who cares.

Linux still can't do my laundry. I'm hoping the next debian patch fixes that.

Well, when that does happen, hopefully the AI doesn't reach out and kill windows. Remember, without windows, Linux becomes the norm and isn't awesome anymore. And without windows, who would hackers infect? They can't infect Linux. And lastly, just about every person who has any kind of software tech-support job will not have it anymore. Wow, I never realized how cool that sounds(in my minds ear). I'm definitely putting that in my signature.:cool:

edit: Man, I spend all that time and effort typing this up and then you go and edit the part about the AI out.