3 years until the shit hits the fan for microsoft. I cant wait....lol. New distros of linux are released about an average of twice a year. That means that linux companies will go through 6 major changes before the new MS OS comes out. I think that in the time we have, we should make as many improvements to kde and gnome as possible, and create a standard for package management that all linux distros can use and that end users can use easily. Also we need to make agreements with hardware manufacturers that gives us linux drivers for hardware written by those companies. Finally, we need as many games as possible. Believe it or not a lot of the people I know would be willing to use linux even though its harder, if it had more game support.
Now its time for my reasoning into the real purpose behind Longhorn. When XP came out, a lot of people who used windows 98se saw no reason to upgrade. After all, all programs that can run on XP can also run on 98. Other than a few pieces of the gui, there was no real incentive. With the release of longhorn, there will be new applications that will not work on win9x. Also MS will drop support of 9x totally. Just like how they dropped support of win 3.x. They believe this will force users of 9x to get Longhorn. You will no longer be able to find new hardware with drivers for 9x. They said they were completely rewriting the file system probably to make this possible. They would make a hell of a lot of money forcing everyone to upgrade.
