Originally Posted By: mlord
and MS forces h/w sellers to pre-install MS products.

Not true. Microsoft did have very shady deals and requirements back in the early to mid 90s with hardware vendors, but the legal cases that started in 93 helped to bring an end to this. Any hardware vendor can (and many do) offer multiple operating systems on hardware. Unfortunately the practices Microsoft used in the past helped kill off any foothold OS/2, BeOS and others could have made in the 90s to avoid the situation today.

This is clearly a situation where the Linux community cannot try and play as the victim and expect things to get better. More effort is clearly needed to ensure Linux is in a state that the big OEMs are willing to bundle, sell, and support Linux in the desktop market in a broader way then they currently are.

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Meanwhile, I have a 15 year old Windows glitch that I've yet to solve: when I dual boot (rarely, but once or twice a year) one of the machines at home into MS WXP, the clock is always off by either 5 or 8 hours from EST.

Windows by default will read the system time as local time instead of UTC. There is some code in the NT kernel back from the RISC days to try and set Windows to use UTC time, but it is buggy. More info on the issue here. It pretty much comes from the IBM PC legacy Windows was born from, where all IBM PCs stored real time in the BIOS and not UTC.