I wouldn't advise anyone against working at a Windows shop or against taking a higher salary. It can be a powerful thing to have an open source advocate (think invader) in a Windows house. Some things, like setting up a Samba server instead of buying another copy of Windows just to serve up files, or like running SVN on a Linux server, are easy to justify on TCO. Still I wouldn't advise working for a large company. They are lethargic and stuck on arcane ways of doing things. That's why I chose a smaller more agile company when time came to give up the grey cube. Hey Jason, if you hate MS Project, you should check out LiquidPlanner - www.liquidplanner.com. We built it just for people like you and it's built on a fully open source stack. :) -bryan »

You're right, he's right, there is just too much tweaking for the average user. But, in a controlled corporate desktop environment where the user has his own IT support, I think Ubuntu is feasible. Corporate desktop should be the next battlefield for Linux. Personal/Home desktop will fall after corporate because people will want to be able to run the same applications they do at work. The big impediment I see to getting Linux or Ubuntu out to corporate users is Evolution. Outlook and Exchange are the kings of IT. I'm sorry to say it, but Evolution is 10 years behind outlook and the gap is growing. Get a good e-mail, contacts and calendar app that plays nice with exchange on the backend and I will finally be able to stand in front of my executive management and say, "I think you guys should run Ubuntu". »

Not only am I running Linux on my desktop, but my desktop is a laptop. I've had a Linux laptop (on my second) for two years and EVERYTHING works! Almost right out of the box with SuSE 10. I recently switched to Kubuntu and the tweaking I had to do was minimal - it took a while to figure out how to change the laptop lid behavior. About the only thing I didn't have out-of-the-box is DVD playback but hey, mplayer, need I say more. Granted, I'm not your average Joe User, but it really is close enough. Let's face facts, if Windows didn't come preinstalled, how many people would be able to get it up and running perfectly on a laptop? »