I don't mean to toss gasoline onto this fire, but......
Too late...
Unix as we know has a vanishingly small probability of ever becoming 'mainstream'. There's a two-orders-of-magnitude gap between the installed base of Dos/Windows and that of Unix. That gap has grown, not marrowed over time. This is however no reflection on the obvious technical merits of Unix. Market dominance is based not on technical superiority, but rather on technical sufficiency. Once an OS acheives technical sufficiency any further technical improvements will have a diminishing marginal effect on that OS's market performance. Once the OS is technically sufficient, non-technical factors begin to dominate. The market failure of WinNT is a classic example of this. Its failure is unrelated to its technical merits (or lack thereof), but rather on econmic and social factors the even a company withe the marketing muscle of MicroSoft has not yet been able to overcome. (OS/2 is of course an example of an even more dismal, perhaps terminal, failure for many of the same reasons.)
UNIX is a _networking_ OS, in my mind, above and beyond anything else which the 'mainstream' may desire. If I want Excel, Word or Powerpoint, I'll use my PC (which is completely compatible, via PPP, and able to exchange data) to work within these obviously proprietary formats. :-) Microsoft hasn't really made any attempt to enbrace the UNIX community. Why should we emmrace Microsoft? - paul _______________________________________________________________________________ Paul Ferguson US Sprint tel: 703.689.6828 Managed Network Engineering internet: paul@hawk.sprintmrn.com Reston, Virginia USA http://www.sprintmrn.com