The people love Windows XP 10136

mlw

That depends on what starting dates you consider. I consider the market wide open as of 1990. Only MS-DOS was in widespread use on PCs then. IBM marketed PC-DOS. Windows 2.0 was nowhere to be seen. There was DesqView and another pretender (Gem?). Then came Windows 3.0 in May of that year. Then Win 3.1, then Win 95. I think it was around 1997 or so that they effectively owned 95% of the market for GUI OSes.

So I think it took the world 6-7 years to give MS a monopoly. They didn't build it - it was handed to them one sale at a time.

I don't get you, with the Linux in quotes. I can't imagine there would ever be any wholesale name change to GLOSS or FOSS or anything else. Windows, Linux and Mac. That's it.

I'm not hearing much of a desktop message from any of them. I don't see Linux ads in the mainstream press, or on TV, or on the high-traffic web sites.

And the huge disadvantage is that there are multiple leaders and competing ideas get tried. The public needs one or a very few sources of Linux information. They don't need to hear competing stories coming from the OSDL and Novell and RedHat (not that there are competing stories, just that there shouldn't be). The public needs standards, so they know what to expect, so they don't have to learn KDE and Gnome, and two or three different package managers, etc.

Not at all.

Surely you don't consider a small fraction of user problems in a nascent 64-bit OS as representative of all of Windows? Then again, you're a Linux devotee, and most likely your love of Linux is exceeded only by your hatred of Microsoft.