lol....my first post in an other OS forum I believe...I just felt I needed to respond...
I am pro MS/Windows....
Anything can replace Windows if it is designed to do so, from product but more importantly to marketing. Don't let your bias make you ignorant. Yes, it is a funny world that exists where a monopoly can be called such, with competition right? Hey..Windows...Linux, other Unix variants, MacOS, even OS2 and for a little bit BeOS...and I think there are a few more other alternatives out there.
When Windows came out...or maybe with win95, people said Windows was about functionality too. You could go buy or build your PC and by Dos or Windows are start coding or doing anything you wanted...full functionality at the cost of, unfortunately, full security. Of course, only intelligent people really realized this
.
So, place bias aside, if you are so pro something or so anti MS/Windows, that is fine, but see what is what before casting doubt.
Do we want a world that is retro computing where we used to hunt down drivers and it was solely up to us to make sure our hardware and software works? Or do we embrace what movements companies like MS do with DX and getting driver libraries into the OS package? I don't want to go back to the days where I had to fiddle with autoexec.bat and config.sys...oddly some people prefer that type of computing....don't get me wrong, it can be fun, but not something we should have to do. Giving us our functionality is not hand holding.
People will be so negative towards all the windows flavors and harp on how it looks or how it does this and that...and after the initial linuxes came....they started implementing Win9X and even Vista GUIs...go figure. No not cloning some other OS gui...but trying to make things look Windows....strange.
Again...strange world where a monopoly has so many alternatives right?
Sometimes people get to blinded and forget, and sometimes people don't realize the mistakes of OTHER companies. Take for example IBM, they had OS2 Warp and the Lotus apps...for a while they sold to consumers...then they changed their strategy and made it a corporate item...no longer seen by consumers. It took a while but they would slowly get lost. This is no move by MS/Windows...but you market to a segment, and you sell to it.
If you don't market and sell to a population, and wonder why they don't buy it, you will lose out, logically. Same thing with all these other Linuxes. You can choose to be a consumer item, or just another smug product. I for one would like to see Linux flavors not follow the MacOSes. There's enough smugness with them, why choose to be the same?
Champion Linuxes as another viable alternative to a consumer OS and not something someone should buy to make them some type of elitist. Anything can compete with Windows (home and corporate) if it is marketed rightly. Try to develop a "consumer" OS and push it as so...Average Joe or Grandma Ann will not want some OS that they have to learn subroutines for or care about being so insubstantially "superior".
Peace be with you