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Return of the '70s Microsoft Weirdos
theodp writes "On the eve of the company's move from Albuquerque to Seattle in 1978, a famous photo was taken (in a shopping mall no less) of the original Microsoft team, looking mighty sharp in their '70s outfits. Almost 30 years later, as Bill Gates prepares to depart from Microsoft, the group (looking older, but better) reconvened for a retake."
Albuquerque is a stupid name. /waits for +5 Insightful
Oh, woe is me. I clicked the wrong reply button. I'm sorry. I'm extremely sick and drowsy from fever right now.
I'm surprised there isn't a K/Ubuntu fork with a windows skin (that I'm aware of). It would be fairly trivial to re-skin K/Ubuntu so that all the window behaviours and icons are similar to XP's (although things like bootloading windows picture and the actual appearance of some elements might be a bit of a copyright issue). As far as Joe User is concerned, nothing's really different (except that instead of installing programs from downloaded executables, they do it from a nice little application, and that some hardware doesn't work). As you say, the solution is to start selling linux-based whiteboxes to start a chain reaction of more support and more interest, but this skin would be a good stop-gap measure for converting "Mom and Pop" without them even realising (the problem being that there's still a geek required to set it all up).
I tried Ubuntu 7.10 recently; I gave up when there weren't drivers for my all-in-one printer, and my husband couldn't use the scanner function. I spent 5 hours trying to get that to work, and I gave up. Most users aren't going to have the patience to do anything but put a driver CD in and double-click setup.exe. Back to XP for me.