I can empathise with a lot of what you say Keef, but I think it is a little overstated. It needs quite a bit of motiviation to make the switch - for me I just like being different, and I'm getting increasingly irritated by MS end user licencing. It does take time to get comfortable with it, and it does take time to tweak the system into your ideal configuration, but once its done, it is superb, and not at all what many would imagine, with a blinking monochrome cursor etc... I prefer the Suse KDE GUI to XP.