Excuse me for replying to this thread nearly 2 years later.  (Just joined!).
In fact this (along with all the other stuff that we know about regarding M$) was what finally flipped me over to Linux. It was initiallly a point of cost, and my ISP refusing to support my old Win client. I figured that if they wouldn\'t support the OS I was using (which was insecure/buggy/crashed all the time) I would get something else that they didn\'t support, but wasn\'t insecure/buggy/and didn\'t crash at ALL.
The fact that it was very nearly free seemed amazing.

I think that the costs involved for Vista ought to drive people to Linux, but folks are very picky whan it comes to this stuff. Despite the fact that Microsoft products always fall short people are suspicious  of Linux and it still hasn\'t thrown off the \'geeky\' image. Only when they actually see KDE in action (for example) do they become half convinced.
Hardware support is, as always, the big issue and will probably remain so as long as the manufacturers keep grovelling to M$ and only writing drivers for Windoze. There is bound to be a time lag while the open source guys catch up.

Overall, I think that people need to be hooked by the CONCEPT of open source and Linux. Their actual choices will then follow...:-)

-TP

I would certainly go along with all that. I think that one of the biggest mistakes M$ made with Vista (and to some extent XP) was the sheer bloat of the system. I remember well the cries of dismay when people realized that Vista\'s main capability was to slow the best system to a crawl!
I\'ve never had any such problems with various distros of Linux. True, some run slow on my old systems, but that\'s to be expected. The beauty is that there is something for everyone really, and the more one uses it the better the concept gets.

Like you, I use Mepis as my main system. for me it gives the best balance of speed with hardware compatibility. It\'s running on a 550 Mhz machine with 256Mb RAM, and it still performs perfectly ok.


The wonderful thing about this is that it\'s rock-steady, and it\'s something I\'ll now always use!:)