vailian

I never make predictions, but here is something to store in your memory: Ubuntu.
Maybe you have heard of it, maybe not. It happens to be a flavor of Linux. It was provided for free with a computer magazine I get here in Germany (c't is what the magazine is called).
Suddenly I realized that we are wasting our time with Windows and Macintosh.
This system does everything that you can do on a Windows machine, only faster, and without a single known virus.
Installation is fast and painless (it lives quite happily on a Windows computer; you choose your operating system when you turn on the machine), and it is the system you MUST choose if you want to give a computer as a present to the elderly aunt and uncle who have never dared to touch a keyboard. It is so simple.
Its native software is wonderfully and touchingly homemade, there is no glitz here, it just does the job and doesn't try to sell you anything.

I have tried a few Linux systems in the past, but there were a lot of hurdles to jump, mostly because the developers are (let's face it) geeks, and as such, prone to using Geekspeak, but (more seriously) it was impossible for them to anticipate the hardware that could be found in a retail computer, because it was changing every day on the component level.
But now there are a set of standards emerging, and components are more compatible.
In any case, on my laptop the system murmured to itself for 20 minutes or so and settled into a comfy corner of my hard drive. It had identified all the components of my system and could communicate with them.
The prompt to Log In is not a bombastic orchestra fanfare, but four soft bongo beats.
Not only is the operating system installed, but all essential software for everyday use: Browser (Firefox), email program, word processor, etc.... all free.
But the thing that warms my heart about it is the community.
If you have a problem with Windows, is it going to do you any good to send an email to Microsoft? The answer, in case you didn't know already, is NO. There are so many problems with Windows that the poor devils at Microsoft wouldn't get any work done if they tried to help mere users.
Their job is to kill the competition and find ways of making more money with their code.
Linux has a sort of Nouveau Hippy philosophy, where individuals write the programs and share them. OK, so they won't get rich this way, but strangely enough there are enough idealists out there, or at least, programmers who have an occasional spasm of idealism, that the operating system has been developing quietly and is now advanced in ways that the commercial systems cannot be. (It is no accident that the world's fastest computers, and most of the world's server computers, use Linux-based systems).
The Great Leap that Ubuntu has made, I think, is to integrate a package that can be installed by a complete dummy, and used immediately. It just works.

So try it. You may not migrate to it entirely (I haven't made that step yet either), but I promise, you will be grateful that you put it on your Uncle Joe's machine, because you won't have to spend so much time teaching him how to use it and putting anti-virus programs on, etc... and as far as I have been able to establish (and , believe me, I have been putting the system through some horrible tests) there is no Blue Screen of Death in Ubuntu.