No part of this article said, “year of Linux”. Perhaps you should reread it.

It is sad that you cannot figure out any Linux distributions, by your own admission. It is good that simplistic Microsoft “7″ works for you. We are all happy for you, keep using Microsoft.

Mandriva Linux works for me and several people I know personally, including some very non-technical users. We will keep using Linux.

Desktop Linux is crap, dude. Get over it. It’s what I did and after struggling with Red Hat, Suse, Gentoo, Ubuntu, you name it, gave up and bought a shiny Windows 7 box. Not looking back.

I find this type of argument from people like you puzzling. People like you being apparently smart and technical should know not to judge all of Linux by one or two distributions. You should also know better than to assume that average users are installing their own operating systems. The greater majority of average users will never do that.

I find that with Mandriva installs the installer almost always gets it right for the video. The rare times it doesn’t I know how to fix it. Since average users get a finished install from me they never have to fix it. Also all the nVidia drivers are available and new ones kept up with via backports. So, it takes a little training to know how to use backports? So what? It takes training to learn how to use any new OS.

No, as in none at all, Realtek wireless drivers? Really?
http://eracc.pastebin.com/D2i6fRAz

Kernel updates break your audio, video and wi-fi? That sucks for you and your distribution of choice but it is not true of every Linux distribution. I don’t use wireless on my desktop tower PC here at the SOHO, but kernel updates here have not broken audio and video for me in a long time. I would guess the last time I saw something like that happen was over three years ago. You need to update your arguments, my friend.

Uhm, why would you expect an operating system that is Not Windows to run software designed For Windows? Especially Microsoft’s own branded software like Office 2007? If a user is going into Linux with that expectation then someone led the user wrong. Many people are already using alternative FOSS software like OpenOffice.org, KOffice, etcetera on Microsoft systems. They would have no problem moving to Linux as far as those office suites are concerned. Find alternatives or petition the commercial software houses to make Linux versions. Good luck with Microsoft on the latter.

If one really needs Turbo Tax under Linux then use Intuit’s online version. Then make sure to have the latest Adobe Reader installed from Adobe (quite easy on major distributions) for the forms. Intuit even mentions Linux on this support page. Yup, many small businesses have one PC with Quickbooks on it and will not change that to another accounting package. So, for now I just set them up with a VM running the version of Microsoft Windows for which they have a license and install Quickbooks in that. They use the virtualized XP/Vista just for Quickbooks and Linux for everything else. However, it has been reported that Crossover Office (by the WINE team at CodeWeavers) runs small business versions of Quickbooks fairly well. Just search the WWW for “Crossover Office” and Quickbooks to find the reports.

Installing software outside of repositories should be discouraged for average users. Those that insist they want to do this should be shown how by those who can lead them. A local Linux User Group (LUG) is a good place for this training.

Oh wow, printing. Uh, all I did on Mandriva to get my Epson Stylus CX3810 (scanner/printer) to work was plug it in. I already had CUPS installed. IIRC, it just auto-magically showed up after that. If it had not shown up then I would have just gone to the Mandriva Control Center and run the “Set up the printer(s), the print job queues, …” under the Hardware tab. Stick with printer companies that are Linux friendly, Like Epson and HP, if you want to use Linux.

You want commercial desktop Linux with support that works out of the box? Pay for Red Hat or SuSE. You’ll get what you want.

1. Hardware. Please don’t tell me that building a most up-to-date nVidia driver is easy. It’s not for an average user. Ubuntu offers to install the so-called latest “driver”, and I will just call it, say “version 185″. Okay, if I just point and click to install as a super user, and then reboot, then maybe the darn thing would work for a while and then a screen would start to flicker. Turns out this isn’t the right driver. Heading to nVidia website and downloading the driver is one thing. Now tell you average user, that they need to drop into CLI and go unpack the driver, then log into the -root account and then whole bunch of other commands like “sudo gdm stop” and then “sh blah-blah dirver”, etc., etc.
Still feeling like and average user?? Don’t think so.
Not to mention that No Distro has kernel support for Realtek Wireless drivers. This simply does not work except if you spend days of your valuable time trying to find a workaround. Hardware support is a bust – enough said.

2. Kernel Trap.
Every major update breaks the system’s audio, wi-fi, and video settings. Sure enough an average user has the time to Google the way to re-build the drivers into the new kernel. Say what? What is kernel, and average user will ask?

3. No Linux distro can run MS Office 2007 and later, or Quick Books, or Turbo Tax/Taxcut Software, and lots of other applications that an average user does utilize on daily basis on their respective Windows machines. BTW, Wine does a very poor job and you really can’t run anything under it with 100% native performance.

4. Software installation.
Sure enough there’s Synaptic and Ubuntu Sofware Center, but tell your average user to install a software that is not in repository or not packaged in .rpm or .deb

5. Printing
This one is by and large my favorite. An average user surely can figure out how to install the drivers that are packed in tar balls an then master the CUPS printing. This stuff really is not solvable for an average user.

I just want to say that Linux shoots itself in foot by not going commercial. By commercial I mean desktop, not server. Server is where Linux performs better than Windows by a large margin.

But folks like myself would love to pay for a Linux OS disk that would just work out of the box and make out lives easier.

Until that happens, Linux will only live in embedded devices and the server side of course. My two cents.