I'll preface this again. Linux is a very good OS, but let's be brutally honest. When you put it up against the criteria of the original post, it does not fit well to what he is looking for.
The OP's criteria were very generic and I believe Linux fits just fine. All that was asked for is user friendly and secure, in general those two are mutually exclusive features so there has to be some trade off. I would say that Vista and Linux are very close and which you choose depends on a lot of other variables that aren't mentioned at all by the OP.
Not true, while many 11b/g cards may work fine, most 11a/n cards do not. And a "bit of work" is a bit of an understatement. I don't know of a single Wireless card that doesn't work under XP, and far more work under Vista than under Linux. Certainly, any wireless board produced in the past year and a half works under Vista.
Since just about everyone has a G card these days it's not a real issue yet, as N cards get more popular it might be but I know hardware support is always being worked on so it's impossible to tell how much of a problem it'll be by then. And other issues come into play like the fact that the wireless UI in XP is utter crap, using wifi on Linux is much simpler with something like NetworkManager.
But often with reduced functionality. My dad's Canon won't be able to use the easy transfer ability of that lets him push a single button on the camera to have it all automatically copy. My Nikon D-SLR under Linux means I can't use my laptop to control my camera. Two, very mainstream cameras that would lose functionality under Linux
The easy transfer thing shouldn't be an issue because plugging in the camera will pop up the Gnome transfer stuff, it's different but it should work. I have no idea about the control stuff for your Nikon but again it all comes down to what's important to you. I really don't think I'd have even noticed that I couldn't control my camera in Linux because I can't think of a reason that I'd want to do that.
Not all games are on either the 360 or PS3, and of course, we're not talking about consoles. We are talking about computer operating systems. So having Bioshock on a console is in no way a tick mark in the Linux is better column.
Totally ignoring the fact that I said Bioshock does run in WINE, the Bioshock requirement was added randomly by some other poster, the OP didn't even mention games at all.
But more importantly, anything requiring Wine to work immediately removes it from the "ease of use" qualification of the original post.
IMO anything requiring Windows to work removes it from the "ease of use qualification" but since games weren't included in the OP's requirements it's irrelevant.
Any time you add something like this, you are adding another layer of complexity that simply makes things less easy to deal with, when they work at all. Of course, in the Windows World, you could accomplish much the same thing by installing VMWARE and then Linux on a virtual machine.
Not really, WINE's not perfect but it's a very thin layer and nowhere near as huge or limiting as a full emulator like VMWare. It's more like the POSIX or OS/2 layers in Windows than Linux+VMWare.
If I put Ubuntu on the secretary's machine at work, and gave her a blank check to buy the software she needed to do the job she'd be crying before the day was done.
And you'd be considered retarded by anyone with common sense. Why would you tell any employee to buy their own software for work? You wouldn't, you'd give them a preconfigured machine with the software they're supposed to use and in that case she'd likely be fine.
WINE and Cedaga are cheap hacks to run software that wasn't meant to be run. Most people don't know what Linux is, much less how to get it to run non-native software.
A lot of people don't know what Windows is, I've had lots of support calls from people saying they're running "Microsoft XP" when they're talking about Office. Ironically those people are the best candidates for Linux because they already have no clue what's going on so it's much easier to just hand them something and show them how to use it without any knowledge about the other system getting in the way.
As far as hardware goes... I have 4 winmodems, 3 USB wireless adapters, and 1 PCI wireless adapter that couldn't even be hacked to work under Linux, much less plug and play. I never got around to trying my printers or my somewhat obscure scanner.
And I've got 6 machines of 4 different architectures and they all work fine. Granted I've only got 2 wifi adapters but they both work fine too.
I've never quite understood why WINE didn't merge in some of the QEMU/KVM technology to run the windows
applications in more of a VM / sandbox that has better isolation from the LINUX host.
Because they don't want isolation, their goal is to make the win32 apps as integrated with the rest of the system as possible.
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