@richwhite

I can only speak for myself, but doing so, I feel safe to say there are plenty of things wrong with Microsoft and Windows. You are speaking from an average end-user point of view, a group to which a lot of people here do not belong. Maemo and the n900 are a tech-savvy combination which offers a lot of freedom to tinkle, on a hard - as well as software level.

As a tech-person who has installed hundreds of machines I appreciate the ease of a Windows install, and there´s not much to complain about a new and fresh install. But that´s about where it stops. It´s the third parties, you say, and you may be right, but I wouldn´t say that as a positive thing for Microsoft. After all, MS creates a general purpose OS that turns out to be working best if you buy additional software from MS only.

Working well or not, one fact is undeniable: any software coming from MS is bloatware. Thanks to MS the world now thinks it´s normal to spend some > 3 gig of harddisk space only to install an operating system.

Compare that to some of the more popular distro´s on distrowatch, that come as a Live CD (Hey, MS never made a Live CD? How strange...) and not only install an OS, but also a complete office suite and more for the end user.

Long story short, for me, there´s plenty of reason to dislike MS / Apple and the like and stay away from it as far as I can.

Luckily we´re not all the same.

PS: I will never forget either how MS killed a wonderfull text editor we were all used to: WordPerfect and how it replaced that with a inferior product the world now thinks of as a de facto standard...