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1) Host a Microsoft Exchange Server, an invaluble reasource to any corporation who relies heavily on the Microsoft Office Suite.
Why any company would want to rely on a bloated piece of software is beyond me. I have had to use MS Word and I must say I've had more bad experiences with it then good. I much rather use lyx so I can concentrate on content rather then layout for word processing. Excel isn't as bad but there are cheaper alternatives which offer the same functionality (like kspread, an excellent spreadsheet, and a *lot* cheaper too). Powerpoint is plain out laughable in comparison to magicpoint, which is by far the best presentation program I have ever seen. With magicpoint you (kind of) program a presentation, though a co-worker of mine who can't program (the best he can manage is write a hello world program in php
) made 3 extremely high quality presentations at the rate of 1/day, he had used powerpoint before and was absolutely ecstatic about magicpoint (plus the fact that you can embed any X application in your presentation is *invaluable* for a software company, instead of just showing screenshots during a presentation we can actually run the program and turn the presentation in a demonstration
). Now why did I want to use MS office again? I forgot .....
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2) Utilize advanced 3D accelerators at their full potential through DirectX, for the most part Linux is limited to OpenGL optimizations and is unable to use the built in DirectX optimizations.
lol, this point actually made me laugh. Then can you please explain why the Chameleon Geforce 3 demo (demonstrating the pixel shader) crashed on the DirectX version with the latest NVidia drivers but ran just fine on the OpenGL drivers? And why reverting to an earlier driver version fixed the DirectX version but not without certain problems (some pixels being shaded wrong, ran very slow).
And (since we are talking about linux as a desktop OS) why the hell then quake 3 and return to castle wolfenstein (and I think also unreal tournament but I can't verify this because I don't have that game) run a lot faster on linux then they do on windows? And why the hell id software (*the* creater of first person shooter genre and the best damn 3d engine maker ever (the quake 3 engine is really excellent, RTCW on a geforce 3 looks awesome)) then still chooses not to use directx?
I personally have not (nor will I ever probably) used directx, I have examined the API though and it looked very awkward to me. I'll prefer SDL/OpenGL over directx anytime.
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3) Rely completely on the GUI without any command line dependancies. The X GUIs such as KDE and Gnome have come a long way in making Liux more user friendly, but high level vital functions still require the use of the command line (the terminal if X is running). Without any command line knowledge, Linux can still be used through KDE but it will basically be limited to being a word processor / web box.
Since we're still talking about a desktop OS we are also discussing productivity. Now let's do some hypothetical stuff here:
We have one average computer user using linux and one average computer user using windows. Both users just recently purchased their first pc and bought with it a beginners book about their OS. The windows user was taught a bit about pointing and clicking their way through their OS, the linux user was taught a bit about pointing and clicking through their OS *and* were taught a bit about using the command line. Now both users have worked a while and they have a lot of redundant files of the same file type they want to trash. First the windows user goes at it, he needs to open explorer (at least 2 clicks, probably more), traverse to the my documents folder (some more clicks), select every single file and not forget to hold the ctrl key as to avoid having to start again (trust me, it happens a lot, which leads up to a whole lot of clicks) all this clicking took our (not so very fast clicking) user about 5 minutes of his work time. Now the linux user goes at it, he has (very limited) knowledge of the commandline option, he has some lyx files in his home directory he wants to remove so he opens up a konsole (1 click) and types in : cd ~/oldfiles [enter] rm * [enter] . Now our user is a slow typer and clicker so this takes him around 30 seconds. Now that's a hypothetical time saving of 4and a half minutes, now you can say well, what is four and a half minutes? Imagine this scenrario in a corporate environment with a 1000 computers, how much time would this single fact alone save the company on yearbasis? (and time is money afterall)
And as for not being able to setup your system from a GUI, you have never actually used SuSE linux right? They have GUI tools for any possible thing you would want to set up (they also have a auto update feature (and a lot safer then the ms one at that too))
Plus the average joe doesn't even want to do use the advanced functions of an OS anyway, he just wants to type e-mails to his sister and browser pr0n sites.
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4) Use a driver certification system, through the use of WHQL driver certification, drivers can be guarenteed to be stable in the OS they are certified for. This is very valuble for less skilled users, with that system in place Windows can be set to reject any non-WHQL drivers and prevent a less skilled user from installing faulty drivers.
Oh dear, I think you have fallen a bit for MS's way of customer binding, you might have noticed by know that on average people are pretty gullible (heck, I think 50+% of the computer users don't even know a PC can work without windows) so they are pretty much inclined to flat out believe what their computer tells them too (Homer Simpson yelling "where's the any key?" is inspired by actual tech support calls, trust me) so Microsoft yelling things about "certified drivers" would mean what? It's safe to install this driver for this computer? So they have tested out that particual piece of hardware with all other pieces of hardware and all other drivers in existance for windows? Because certified or not, *ALL* software has bugs. Then MS argues, the people should buy only microsoft certified hardware, so they run off to the nearest best buy or dixons or what they call it where you live, and shells out a lot of money on new hardware and just throw the old hardware away, but the people then realize that their computer still crashes oncee in a while because *ALL* software has bugs (I can't stress this enough
). Can you honestly say that this is a good thing? Do you truly believe that this is a good bussiness model?
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5) Support the majority of hardware and software out on the market. This is a major plus for consumers, through all of the support Windows has throughout the hardware and software industries the users will be open to a much broader range of products that will work with their system.
Like I said .... have you *ever* installed SuSE linux? It even recognised my trident integrated cyberblade on my old comcrap pc, I haven't had a single piece of hardware it didn't recognise immediatly. If I had (I put a geforce 2 in it
to install win 2k from scratch I had to go through the agony of finding a driver for the cyberblade (or have that funky 640x480 16 colours look) which was extra hard because trident filed a lawsuit against VIA (or vice versa, I forgot, it was a real mess anyway) and on the VIA site it said go to S3 and on the S3 site it said go to VIA. So that invalidates another of your points.
And while I've completed my list, I would like to point out a few things in your list.
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That one was correct... Linux is definately THE platform for programming.
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I couldnt' imagine *ever* programming under windows again, if I had to write win32 software I'd either opt for using a platform independant toolkit or using the wine API.
Now, in closing I think I should clear a few things up on where my opinions stand. First, when I defend Windows, I am only defending the NT variations of it, Win9x was without a doubt a horrible OS, almost the the point of being unusable. Second, I do not hate Linux, it simply doesn't fit my needs for anything other than my HTTP/FTP/IRC server, I feel it's an excellent OS for most servers and for programming, it just leaves a lot to be desired in the feild of general desktop usability. And finally, Apple... Apple is a company I strongly dispise, they depend heavily on hype and aesthetics, neither of which matter in terms of real performance and as a company, they engage in some very childish mudslinging.
Well, that's my two cents...
To each his own I say, however microsoft will have a hard time selling me anything, ever .... (and this is not because of a biased or clouded vision, this is due to experience and frustration)
My 2 euro cents
(WARNING: this post will probably contain lot's of spelling and grammatical errors, please look past them, thank you )
