“Yes, but Linspire, Novell-SuSE, Red Hat, Mandriva can beat Windows”

Excepting perhaps Linspire, where those other distros fail, IMO, is in understanding the human elements that make a software product a success (something Micrsoft does very well). That doesn’t just mean “the right features” (where MS is starting to lag these days) but more stuff like “the right appeal”.

Firefox is one app that has that appeal.

The first really promising distro I’ve seen, which I think could become what Firefox is to Mozilla, is Ubuntu (http://www.ubuntu.com/). It begins with the picture they have on their home page.

“Linux cannot beat Windows because Linux is just a kernel”

So the correct reply is:

“Yes, but Linspire, Novell-SuSE, Red Hat, Mandriva can beat Windows”