>>Most industry analysts are in agreement that Linux on the desktop is dead. Windows still reigns there and will continue to reign there for sometime.
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>>But, in the server room, things are different. Why do you think Microsoft yesterday announced a SQL Server ODBC driver for Linux?
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>Agreed. If you can benefit enough from not having licensing fees and have the expertise to deal with Linux (which is a complete PITA IMHO) it can be economically viable.

Not so sure... I know I have wasted hours trying to set up an app to run under IIS 7.5 - and now again under IIS 6 - simply because it's a commercial product. Whatever I google (even when I limit the search to microsoft's sites), about 95% of texts found are sales pitch. Or, when they're technical, they're most likely for one of the older versions. I've limited my searches to long strings from the event log.

And, believe me, even when I find an article that's all about what I was looking for, it contains just two sentences... more or less telling me what I already knew.

And this is just for the one web app that I already had running in two places (so how hard can it be, just copy the settings, eh?). Took me a week for 7.5 and now for 6.0 it's two days and my progress is "getting a different error message now".

To compare, five years ago I tried out a little website in PHP, on FreeBsd, using MySql and Apache - and found my way around all of it in a single day. And on Ubuntu, the forums are hosted by Ubuntu themselves, and the people working on it do take part on the forum - not writers of third party tools or guys from support. The problems get resolved much faster and easier. And, uh, nobody's trying to sell me anything.