->> Most users would not even consider Linux after hearing of its ->> disadvantages as a home OS: Yes..they do read CNET FUD. ;) ->> StarOffice is nowhere near as fast or feature-full as MS Office, I've worked in big corps and small offices. In IT, helpdesk and other such roles..never have I seen even the most heavy of power user..use all the features. Often I heard complaints about the bloat and their confusion over having to sift through all the features just to find the "one" thing they need. Tons of features does not a wp make. ->> IE is nowhere near as stable and fails to render all pages ->> perfectly, fonts (even anti-aliased) look like crap compared to ->> the latest WIndows / Mac desktop (my win95 installation has ->> better / more fonts than my SuSE 7.2 installation) Well, this is because of proprietary tags that just work in IE such as iframe. It also has to do with the fact that IE ignores bad code which Netscape/Mozilla doesn't. Mozilla can do just fine rendering most anything that IE can. The problem we run into is that developers of these websites do not test with Mozilla/Netscape6 and they use "user-agent" strings to identify the browser. When the server gets a response of "mozilla X.X" from a browser it registers this as Netscape..and doesn't much care what version because the people who put it together do not make any distinction between 4.XX and 6.X .. if it's Netscape then it can handle only blah..blah. So we users who don't have a proprietary browser w/ proprietary tags can't view the site correctly. Do this as an experiment. Go to www.techweb.com w/ Konqueror...you will see that the page is ALL frelled up. Click the icon with the little hat (to change the user-agent) and change the user-agent to IE 5.5 under Win2k and it will auto reload the page and it comes up PERFECTLY. If you use Netscape 4.X or Mozilla's string..it's still frelled up. It's because they don't test for anything but IE under WINDOWS. Even IE 5.1 on MacOSX..a truely modern browser by your standards can't render a lot of pages because it's not tested for fonts or anything else. What your saying is bullshit. You condemn the software when the true root of the problem is the so called " web developers " out there..they are the issue. My wife worked for a HUGE web dev firm..and they were so lazy that they really only tested on IE under Windows. Your statements are weak and easy to dismiss if you do know what your talking about...which you don't. -> no standard package format RPM and DEB. A standard doesn't mean just one way of doing things otherwise we would have 1 world language, 1 culture ..etc..etc. The Nazi's tried to make it this way..we stopped them for a reason.. -> no standard GUI KDE and Gnome..they ship with EVERY distribution.."see above reason" -> no standard video / audio API (a la DirectX) OpenGL and ALSA .. they can be used on every distribution..and even Win/Mac can use OpenGL ..wow multi-platform..now THAT's a standard. Your arguements are weak and very easy to dismiss..if you want to troll about how GRAND Microsoft software is...please do it in your own forum. Not ours. If you want to learn how to make Linux a joy to use..stick around. We will help you get it all correct. And don't think I don't know what I'm talking about..I use to admin a server farm of 350 NT 4.0 servers...granted it was 3.5 years ago..but I do know a bit about standard and what is just plain FUD crap. I haven't touched in since..but my memory serves me well. Cheers.. -- Ben Rosenberg mailto:ben@whack.org cat CE|ME|NT|XP > /dev/null