Windos_No_Thanks,

I agree with you on that subject...

When M$ becomes "less" popular than it is, hardware, and software, manufacturers, will be starving to produce for "something" to make ends-meet. That "cute" little window that everyone looks for on any new products, may turn into a penguin. People may stop looking for that familiar "Runs in Windows xxx" stuff, and may need to look for "Made for Linux xxx"...

Heck, if we are really looking to the future, for good, or bad...

"Sherman, set the way-back machine to five years in the future...", Yes, Mr. Peabody...

Hardware and software packaging, may, start to LIST Linux in the requirements, and even in the "Drivers Provided" section.

I can fathom that. Walk into a computer store, and look at the next greatest hardware and software, and have listed on the side-panel, Works with Linux, or, Drivers for Linux...

It can happen. Especially, if hardware, or software, creators, realize that another market exists that they can exploit. Right now, they don't care that much. M$ only has provided them a market that they don't seem to have to worry about, as long as they follow the "current" leaders footsteps.

As the market share starts to shift, these companies may start to see some of the profits start to drop, and someone may happen to notice that they have been avioding another market in the world.

I guess, if I am going to put a label on that time, it would be something like: "The Great OS Market Shift", and will be a time when manufacturers come to realize that providing M$ specific products only, may be decreasing the overall profits of the company. That time will be when WinModems go by the waist-side, as something like the OLD XT computer systems, and manufacturers begin to create hardware modems in droves again.

Hardware and software will begin to come out that is either made for ANY OS, or, at least can be "tweaked" for use in "alternate M$ OS's" to get them to work. After that phase of evolution, the next phase will be multiple OS capabile hardware and software, products that run "native" in the OS. The final phase, will be Linux specific hardware and software.

The final phase will lead down the path to marketing research that follows the purchasing of the "Linux" and "M$" products, and then determine which "side" provides a company with its better share of profits under purchasing. Linux, will probably beat out the M$ side on that, and soon after that, more products will be released with Linux, and less with M$. This can be liked to the same as finding any products "now" that provide support for Win95, or even the more older, Win3.x support.

Marketing, or even research and development companies releasing products, will soon realize that the Linux side is WIDE OPEN, and a market that has very few competitors in it. R&D software and hardware companies will realize that, in the case of the Linux community, we are dealing with "last years latest and greatest", and making products that can be used "off the shelf" for Linux, would be swallowed up whole, by the community. If a company can see that having a market that is "waiting" for something, is far more interested in that, than the M$ side, where products are in severe compitition with each other for the lions share in the M$ world, a Linux specific would have a hay-day in purchasing, I think it is only a matter of time.

I'd like to see Linux get as close to M$ as far as the PnP side, but, not to the extent of loosing what makes Linux better than the M$ side. Windos_No_Thanks, this could come from that using "non-native" drivers from the M$ side. By using, I may add, some of those inferior drivers, it may cause the stability of Linux to decrease. And as someone already said, it decreases the "need" for the software/hardware developers to create "native" products into Linux. Why recreate the wheel, when all we need to do is bash out a few kinks in our already created wheel to get it working in Linux. If we begin to walk down that path, Linux may soon be the same kind of OS as M$, and Linux will begin to see the same things that M$ OS's are already plagued with, possibly to the extent of seeing the Blue Screen Of Death in Linux.

Just my thoughts,
Cuddles