Linux IS ready for the desktop. It works fine for all sorts of purposes.
You can surf. You can edit photos, you can hook up your camera. You can get wireless going. You can setup a music studio.
Anything you want.
Stuff like wireless support is not up to the people that develop the the kernel.
The people that do build desktops have a wide amount of devices and hardware to choose from.
I have a 802.11g wireless card. All I have to do is copy the firmware from a website into my /usr/lib/firmware directory and it's running.
Pluss it's probably better wireless card then what you have. Possibly cheaper too. Why? Because hardware that is properly supported under linux is usually better quality then stuff that doesn't work in LInux easily. For example it can support ad-hoc, managed, and master modes. Lots of cards can't even do that.
if you want ACPI that works, you can have it. If you want a wireless card that is easy to setup, you can have it. If you want a video card that is supported automaticly, you can have it. SATA? No problem.
Plus WinXP may be a improvement over stability then Win9x, but this is something that Linux had from the beginning. It had proper multiuser support from the beginning, it has had proper security from the beginning. This is still stuff that MS still can't get right.
If the only ruler your going to compare OSes by is Microsoft's Windows then Linux will never be ready. This is because Linux ISN'T windows, and will never be as good at being Windows as Windows is.
But if you try to measure Windows by using Linux as the ruler, guess what? Windows looks worse then when you compare Linux using Windows as the standard.
Standard developement tools aviable from default installs. Networking is 100x more capable then WinXP. Stability is better. Security is much much better. Software quality is generally better.
Gimp is a decent example of this, so is Firefox's Gecko rendering engine. Gecko is superior to IE in almost every way possible. Gimp is better then MS Paint. It may not be better then Photoshop, but the difference is that Gimp costs 0 and Photoshop is 300 dollars. It's certainly better then the crap that you get free when you buy a scanner.
Windows defenders go on and on about how much easier it is to get hardware support in Windows. How much easier it is to install Windows then Linux.
But thats' pointless to even discuss to the vast majority of people. If you go and buy LInux desktop machines, everything is installed. Everything is working. Everything you'd want you can have, you can't just buy random POS hardware and expect it to work with no effort.
For example look at HP's
linux offering
Everything works. ACPI works, wireless works, video card works. Every peice of equipment HP sells with that laptop that they sell along with Suse, works right out of the box.
THAT's why Linux is ready for the desktop. It's makes a fine desktop, and any normal end-user can operate it fairly well. There are a few nagging issues that is going to piss you off (such as printing support), but that's pretty flaming pointless to a person who would buy a Linux PC that comes with a printer, like many Windows computers do.
But beleive me, I just installed WinXP this weekend for my folks and it took me several hours of downloading, rebooting, installing software in order to get it to a usable, safe, and stable working order. If I just handed a WinXP home cd + a bunch of computer parts to my mom, then that would suck just as much as if I handed a Fedora install cdrom set + a bunch of computer parts to my mom.
For me, personally, Linux definately makes a much superior desktop enviroment then Windows.
The business desktop is the next step for Linux. Free software is already dominating the internet. A full 1/3 of the servers sold use Linux as the operating system for the server. Combine that with the BSD's and other Unix systems their are more of Unix-like operating systems out their and running important stuff then MS's servers. Also it's more impressive when you take into account that 1big unix server can do the same work that it would take dozens of Windows servers to do on x86 hardware.
For home users, MS has nothing to worry about from Linux for a long long time. Why? Because people are set in their ways, unless they have a reason to move to another OS they won't. Do they care that they are using WinXP? No. Do they have brand loyalty to Microsoft? No. If they have a WinME do they install XP over it generally? No. Would you? Yes, unless your a moron.
What else has Windows going for it? People are familar with the system, they are familar with the applications. Windows isn't easy to use, and people often attend classes in order to operate it. Many people have to attend classes to use Office correctly. Most people would have to attend classes to install Windows correctly.
They have no desire to redo that to learn linux unless they have a realy good reason, and that doesn't exist(yet). That's why your not going to see any major migration from Windows.
It has much less to do with technologic superiority vs inferiority then what we would like to beleive. We talk about stuff like that because we are technologistist. We are geeks.
After all if technological supperiority is what dictates market forces, then firefox would be used in a hell of a lot more computers then just the 10-15% share that it currently has.
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