text: These sorts of art­icles come out all the time, and they are always writ­ten by people who have not used Linux much and there­fore don't under­stand how it works and how it is developed. The art­icle is not without mer­it, but it does dis­play many mis­un­der­stand­ings. Most telling are the omis­sions — the fact that the real strengths of Linux are ignored and the defi­cien­cies of Win­dows over­looked. It gives undue weight to pro­pri­et­ary soft­ware devel­op­ment and totally for­gets about the free altern­at­ives that are avail­able for Linux. And by 'free', I mean the prop­er 'free as in free­dom' defin­i­tion, not the tired-old 'free­ware' mis­con­cep­tion that the author makes. As for the antique 'too many dis­tros' argu­ment, people only need to use one, and some quick read­ing would eas­ily nar­row the choices down to a small hand­ful, if not one. I per­son­ally find the dif­fer­ent 'dis­tros' of Win­dows (includ­ing WINCE and so on) to be more con­fus­ing.
  These crit­ic­al art­icles about Linux aren't new, but they should not be ignored. Linux has many rough edges to smooth out, but then again so does Win­dows. At the end of the day, it often comes down to people being set in their ways and being afraid of the unfa­mil­i­ar.
  Nev­er under­es­tim­ate the power of iner­tia and mar­ket­ing.
  Update 2: Here's anoth­er rebut­tal to these art­icles.
  The "too many dis­tros" argu­ment has some mer­it. From a sup­port stand­point, people can get frus­trated if they have a prob­lem, and it's not an issue for some oth­er dis­tro, but it is for theirs, and they need to find people with their dis­tro for assist­ance. Even if it's broken on both dis­tros, the fix for Gentoo may well not be a val­id fix for Kubuntu. If the fix involves installing anoth­er pack­age, the answer would be com­pletely for­eign.
  I abso­lutely switched from win­dows to linux. I have all the tools I need for my work, and it's not a techy work, just office work. I have Open­Of­fice, a msn clone, thun­der­bird for email, fire­fox for web browser and for game­ing a little I have Enemy ter­rit­ory. But still, linux has way to go if it wants to com­pete along with win­dows. Some applic­a­tions are not very easy to install. Win­dows users are used to click setup, next next and fin­ish and they expect the same in linux. In linux some applic­a­tions are not there, but the major­ity are. I'm con­fid­ent that in a year or 2 linux will be much much bet­ter and will be head to head win­dows whatever ver­sion of win­dows.
  Right now i'm using Ubuntu 7.04 and abso­lutely sat­is­fied.
  I would recom­mend linux to every­one if it just worked. But it does­n't:
  — Ubuntu Dap­per, could not for the life of me get sound to work, des­pit­ing look­ing up sev­er­al prob­lems, no 3d accel­er­a­tion, …
  I think we must stop talk­ing. We have lot of home­work to do, and we have done lot of good things so far. We must deliv­er good products, as Fire­fox, as Open​Of​fice​.org, as NeoOf­fice, as GNOME/​KDE, as Linux ker­nel, a Samba stack. We must keep push­ing it. We must take small steps to attain big tar­gets.
  For someone to under­stand why Microsoft is beloved God of IT, it should under­stand simple mar­ket­ing basics. Microsoft spends enorm­ous money on that as they have done since begin­ning. It is all about appear­ance. It means that IT is still lux­ury in lot of places. When IT will start to be more tool than toy (it's already hap­pen­ing in lot of places), then altern­at­ives become more attract­ive. Until then, Win­dows is used, because it's what you use without think­ing.
  Desktop linux with all its free altern­at­ives is still about as use­less as what Win­dows NT would be to us now. The linux desktop is always play­ing catch­ups.
  Of all of them the most pol­ished for the desktop Ubuntu still can­not do some of the basic things like play an MP3 from my SAMBA serv­er.
  The prob­lem (which will always be a prob­lem) is that the whole lot is too open, too many people con­flict over how some­thing should be imple­men­ted and con­seqeuntially you have 5 dif­fer­ent pack­age man­agers, 10 dif­frent win­dows man­agers, 8 dif­fer­ent shells, and 360+ dif­fer­ent linux dis­tri­bu­tions..