My friend Chris Taylor wrote today on his weblog, Synthetic Morpheme:

Linux starts to look more like Windows, Windows starts to look more like Macintosh, Macintosh starts to look more like a lollypop and yet is the software that runs on these systems actually getting better? Here's the point of view of an admittedly non-technical reporter who points out the divide that separates techies from users [The Washington Post]

I'd like to throw in my two cents to this issue (as I seldom do)... I read an article a while back that gave the "whole product" perspective to computer design. Microsoft products have a "whole product" superiority right now because they are the most wide-spread. People work more efficiently when they don't have to be re-trained on new systems, and when they can easily exchange document and project files with each other. But this superiority is tenuous. Apple may outflank Microsoft by having a well designed machines which run MS office software and offer an asthetic outer package. The appearance is part of the whole product. But I think Linux is catching up by leaps and bounds. You can run it on virtually any hardware. It runs astronomically better than Windows. And the interface is starting to look a little more familiar to Windows-ites. But to me, the most amazing achievement of Linux is that it is now easier to install and set up than Windows! How did that happen? Everything on my machine was automatically set up and configured during my Red Hat install. It works, and it is stable. I've gone through six Windows re-installs and three Red Hat migrations without losing a scrap of data from my Linux partition. It is true that to run Linux you need a bit more know-how. But I'd like to point out that The amount of knowledge you need to use Linux today is much less than what you would have needed to use DOS twenty years ago. In real terms, Linux is no longer "hard to use." Its just "harder" to use than Windows by a small amount.