The more I read about things like Cornficker the more I’m glad I run Ubuntu. Red Hat may say this or that about the Linux desktop; but the truth is that it don’t matter. It simply does not matter what Red Hat says or does not say about Linux on the desktop. The reality is that it simply works for people now and we’re not waiting for a puck. I am working hard on giving a f**k what Red Hat says and caring. Ubuntu far surpasses anything Red Hat could ever carry out and they give me a new version every 6 months to taste. I can stick with a long term release or go play with newness.
I would be interested in finding out the number of people that do run Linux and also run a Virtualization piece to give them access to some of windows without having to really run the whole thing. Vista in VirtualBox is okay and I can live with it. The Vista I got on my new thinkpad was just terrible. They overload it with so many crap applications like ThinkVantage which never did work and then with the myriad rescue and hidden partitions. Bad Lenovo!
But running in a virtual session in seamless mode gives you the windows you may still need while opening up the far more flexible Linux desktop underneath. I can get a terminal launched, do actual work on the Linux based appliances easier, run rsync, have access to a set of other tools I use a lot, but still have Outlook 2007 talking nice to our finicky exchange server. Cut and paste works well and I share a folder to make things nicer for documents. I would never actually place a work document in a virtual OS that runs Windows so the documents live underneath on a file system which gets rsync’ed every day to another Ubuntu fileserver at home.
Consider that you could run Ubuntu or CentOS or whatever as the host and still do the windows things you need. You would only see as much of windows as you need. Or consider learning Linux by doing it the other way. Install some Linux from here as a guest.
This way works really well for me. I have just enough Windows to get work done (mostly Outlook work email). The rest, like writing documents and editing other documents is done with OpenOffice.
