Operating System and Linux distribution war, what are important

Someone commented my posts spam because of I stressed the importance of appearance in an operating system on digg.

I wouldn't say appearance is the most important thing but, chosen rightly, I think the battle goes down to trivial things.

Here's my list of importance of operating systems for single users:

-2: Performance. It's negative 2 because if you choose the operating system that best suits your hardware, I believe all systems offer similar performance. After tweaking/tuning, I would say most operating systems offer you almost perfect performance. XP or Ubuntu, or Fedora.

-1: Compatibility. Choosing the wrong version makes performance unbearable. Most people tend to choose the "newest" which makes their computers hardly working but Linux is a great chance to go retro. But for average computers like mine, which can run XP, Ubuntu or Fedora smoothly, compatibility counts very much. I know with each version, you can fix the problems and I post things on fixing those problems too. But still, there are times that things just don't work such as Dell Inspiron 1300 with Redhat Linux Enterprise. I've tried, very hard. I had it working with Fedora Core 6 even. But it's just not worth the effort.

0: Little things that you use. These are all non-positive because the operating systems are all in distinguishably close, including this one. There are little things that you really need to use. Like a handheld device etc. Sometimes it supports them better, sometimes not so much.

Again, I know there are amazing innovations etc. going on with operating systems. But if you are a personal user and you bought a desktop at Windows XP era, no matter how great the new technologies are in Vista, you mostly only look up to it. Fedora 7 reminds you that your RAM is low when you have a 256MB PC, what does Pulse Audio or Compiz or any of that matter.

1: So it comes down to appearance. Other things close. You should definitely choose the one that looks most comfortable to you. Why shouldn't you enjoy a desktop as pretty as possible?

2: There are actually other details. Any market loses a overwhelming decisive force and instead become kind of chaotic when competition is extremely close and intense. Hence, the details weigh much more in proportion than their technicality.

Again, I am looking at an operating system from a commercial point of view. And it is a reasonable perspective because at the end of the day, you want everybody, with or without technical skills to use your operating system as a tool instead of some top challenge of their intelligence.

Average people don't hop among operating systems, testing their performances, studying their features, etc. What might even happen is that they saw this little game on the computer at work and they just want to play the game at home (and all operating systems let them surf the web, read emails satisfactorily.).

If you have a super powerful operating system hiding on your computer, that is cool, but what's better is that you make it possible for everybody to enjoy. So in 20th Century, Windows won and Linux lost because Windows got as much if not more as it deserves and Linux, with all its merits, doesn't even attract hardware vendor's support.

I do think Linux run faster, more stable on my computer and it has amazing abilities to resurrect older computers. However, even bigger than the little shining point, appearance I am talking about, its usability stops it from being something everybody uses. And that's not something Linux should be proud of. I believe most Linux developers want their systems to be as accessible as possible but they are just unable to (not because they are incapable but because of a mixed plethora of reasons, timing, tradition, etc...).

Survival is fundamental to any sort of victory other than the imaginary and Ubuntu sees exactly that. The hardest part for any essentially great thing is to past its survival phase. There's no way to fetch the "good" things that died because it never really had the chance to develop the full potentiality but we can do notice the hard times before Google or Microsoft made the impact.Hong Kong was deemed a barren island when the first British Dukes landed and most of the early investors in growing corn in America lost all their money. So if a Linux distribution is to succeed, it shouldn't let the details put it to death. How many Linux distributions or an operating system will a person ever use? One defect easily kills it when others appear to be not so bad at first sight. And when you see one seemingly defective thing and a non-seemingly-defective thing, will you go around to try the seemingly flawed to discover something great that beat the non-flawed? And what would most people do when they see an ugly Linux vs. a fancy Vista.

I don't have enough proof to make it a solid truth only by arguing like this but some supporting ideas and research could be done like this which should give us some very valuable answers.

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