Is it Windows 7 worth the money?

[djarrum]

That shouldn't be so hard, make it easy to use and have programs that can do exactly what windows programs can do. I'm not talking productivity but more on the line of instant messengers where you can have all that cute stuff that people like along the line of winks in msn messenger, audibles in yahoo etc.

That's what a lot of ordinary users want. I have shown some people linux and they say I know I can IM but I want my winks!

As I asked before, Please find something that doesn't have a Linux equivalent or wont run on wine. Before you start naming every video game you can think of, I know, direct x this and direct x that. most games wont work even with wine. An interesting aside however, the most popular online game runs exceptionally well on Linux. The only reason Blizzard discontinued support for it's Linux client was because Microsoft threatened to take away their "Windows compatibility logo" if they offered a Linux platform.

And these days Linux is pretty easy to use. What gets people confused when working with Linux is the fact that Linux is still and always has been a network/server OS and as such user access control is central to the OS. Something that vista users will not like. However, the folks at canonical have done a great job bringing Linux to the masses by simplifying it enough that every day people can install it, and if they need to learn how to do something, hop on a forum like this one and get a prompt answer, no pun intended.

If IMing is what really matters to you, you could have just stuck with your cell phone, you didn't need a whole computer... oh wait, most of those cell phones run a Linux OS.