My brother just tried Ubuntu 7.04 and he already uninstalled it because it doesn’t do what he wants to: support the SkyStarII PCMCIA card to watch satellite TV. Now, of course, there is support for it after you do all this (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) work, but no newbie in his right mind would do all that. It’s not a matter of double-clicking an app so it’s out of the question for him.
This is why Linux, or any other alternative OS for that matter, will never catch on. Because people have perks. Every user has one niche application or feature that they need and other OSes don’t provide in the same manner. Speaking for myself, the reason I still use WinXP as my main OS is the fact that (except that it works near-perfectly for me) it is the only OS that I can run many mobile phone emulators.
In other words, less than 10% of the world’s computer users are actually true average Joe Users. Even if they only do one single non-standard thing more than just let’s say, emailing and web browsing, that’s enough to not be cataloged as Average Joes. While in the traditional sense of the word my brother would be an average Joe User, in reality, he is not. And this is why Linux is more successful as a server and the Mac as an AV platform instead of desktop platforms: because they fill a niche in a way that it’s better than Windows’. If you have moved to an alternative OS, no matter how geek you try to look like by doing so, you did so because you either are in fact part of that 10% of the ‘True Average Joe Userbase’ or because you have the technical knowledge to overcome migration obstacles.