Windows = Fail
Linux = God
Problem =
Solution = Kill Windows + Mac.
So? Wine is not an emulator, today, all of the games I own (No DX10 games... - who need those anyway? OpenGL3 will come soon) are working fine under linux, people often say they must be emulated, this is wrong: They will be copied to memory and the cpu can just run them like on windows, all wine does is adding the windows kernel functions to the linux environment. /*Edit: Forgot to say that unreal 3 etc have native linux support*/
I have seen a presentation about the next windows but they said they want to focus on integrated applications and right management etc - that sucks.. An os should only be a layer between hardware, software and the user, not a tool collection.
alien: you are wrong in (nearly) every single point, the problem is, that your dad doesn't know whats going on in his pc while running vista, it will lock alot of hardware features, send data to microsoft etc - not really user friendly (And thats probably the reason why installing XP over is alot of trouble).
Personally I believe linux has mouse support since its initial release in 1992. When I used linunx back in 1998 as a 8-year-old I remember that it atleast had mouse by then support. I can't say much about macs, but its potential is great. Also its pretty stupid to buy an OS for a few hundred euro only to get a ram/cpu eating thing with bad power management.
btw: there was a DSL release once which needed 1mb ram and 50mb hdd space - now that rocks...