DrWhizBang's Journal: Where is the critical mass?

I just tooled up my step-mom's new Christmas gift, a nice little value PC. The thought crossed my head that I should put linux on it. After all, I have become a very happy user of Redhat 8.0 on three PCs (including my home one that my wife and kids use). I know that she will not be buying any windows games, and linux has all the other tools she needs (i.e. cd burning, web, email, im, word processing).

But I couldn't do it. I wouldn't be able to to explain to her why her computer could not download all the windows software, or why gnome-toaster is so difficult to use, or why she has to remember a "root" password in case it asks her.

It gets better everyday. CD-burning and font management plugins for nautilus are almost there. Mainstream sites now carry linux software, and it is becoming increasingly more difficult to find some media type on the web that i can't handle.

Soon. Very soon.