Microsoft Vista and Open Source

Now that the hoopla around the Windows Vista Beta 2 has died down, I've been thinking about the comparisons between Vista and Dapper (the latest version of Ubuntu).

For those of you who have heard Linux advocacy before, I can assure you that Dapper will not do everything your current desktop does, in 1/10th of the memory at twice the speed while bringing peace to the Middle East. What it will do is install easily, give you real choice about how your desktop looks (gnome (default) or kde (via the "kde" metapackage)), a choice of office suites (OpenOffice AbiWord or the commercial StarOffice (from Sun)). Dapper comes with astounding minimum hardware specs, but if you don't see a link between hardware and performance, I've got a bridge you may be interested in.