I have been saying about the fonts for a long time!!! Linux default fonts really suck. I would call them at best "adequate". There is no comparison today between nice vista fonts + cleartype (which unfortunately has patents that might prevent to implement anything similar) and what linux offers by default. If you spend enough time tweaking you can have something decent. I even wrote on the opensuse ui lists about the ugly default fonts and no comments. "No, better to support an OpenSource font design and editing app so that the starving hordes can flood the world with new fonts." The application is not the point. You can support as many apps you want but if no typographers are spending effort and time doing something nice, this won't do anything. And all the nice fonts that are currently on the distribution are often donations from companies. Not art by "starving hordes". Concerning the desktop, I think this will change soon. Compiz is rather well supported (= one click on Opensuse no complex install) and its new version "compiz-fusion" is truely nice. It just needs a little more stability and integration with gnome and kde. And Linux folks have to admit that Readyboost is a nice innovation. No matter how much you think the OS drags (I think a full gnome install can drag too) - using a usb key for caching is smart. I bet that even on server apps this could help (like mysql/apache caching). To finish, concerning MediaCenter, there are commercial linux alternatives. SageTV which has better capabilities than MediaCenter on many levels, is available on Linux. »

Java has been Linux friend for a long time at least for enterprise applications. It doesn't need any technical changes, openjdk or not, this won't make any difference (except to GPL extremists). The multimedia side is quite mature on Java... There just need to be content providers and users. Microsoft Silverlight might have a future on linux for this purpose... The mono team got some impressive results so far. »