>> In many ways though , I would consider desktop Linux a success regardless of marketshare for the simple reason that it is now possible to "use a computer in

>> In many ways though , I would consider desktop Linux a success regardless of marketshare for the simple reason that it is now possible to "use a computer in freedom". I think the software world would be a bleaker place if Torvalds , Stallman et all hadn't spent the hours pushing code. Imagine a world where the cheapest HTTP server license went into thousands of $ I completely, wholeheartedly, agree with this. I will always maintain at least one Linux machine for this very reason. >> People site usability concerns etc and while there are some issues there I think it's mostly "good enough" now and we're long past the days of having to compile a .tar.gz full of .c files and fettle with vi in order to get sound to work. IMHO usability is still a concern. I truly believe it scares off quite a few potential users. Anecdote : I've watched as a room full of professional developers cursed at their screen while working past Unity, dealing with NVIDIA driver compatibility and playing around with Xorgs. All the while, mind you, the devs using OSX would occasionally chime in with casual snark such as "oh, installing tomcat on OSX is really just a drag and drop..." Obviously, we all got our desktops working - and I'm actually very fond of my highly tailored Xubuntu setup. However, it wasn't exactly pain free. I have to think that many a casual user might be put off by such an experience.