most who play Everquest are addicted and have high level characters that they do not want to abandon. My brother is one of them, can't get him off the computer and stop him from playing Everquest without prying his hands from the keyboard using a crowbar. It is most of what he does on a computer. It is as addictive as ciagrettes or beer to others. He has no social life except the online Everquest social life of teaming up with other players to slay monsters, etc. He is not alone at this.

BeOS was an alternative to Microsoft Windows and it did run on WINTEL hardware, it is relevant because this thread was about leaving Windows and finding alternatives. But it is also an example of what can go wrong when a company competes with Windows. As far as I know it isn't being developed on anymore and might no longer be sold. It ran on BeBoxes, PowerMacs and WINTEL clones, just not the G3 PowerMacs and above.

My point was that Windows is preinstalled, and there is no need for the average user to partition hard drives or download drivers for Windows. Even still, if their hardware is not completely Linux friendly, they will get those install issues that I and others have gotten. Little snafu's like Media Errors, and the GUI setup locking up during the install of X. My other brother got those errors too. I tried to get him to at least try Linux, but he could not install it. He can do a ground level install of Windows ME and XP with the partitioning of hard drives and driver installs, but Red Hat Linux did not install for him. I blame the hardware, I had two local Linux experts try and they also told me the hardware was at fault. I've posted about this problem before, Linux just doesn't work with 100% of the hardware configurations out there.