Evolution of Linux

Linux is evolving! The logic of remaining in an unchanging, or slowly advancing state is flawed, as has been unquestionably proven by Distro's such as Sabayon, PCLos, Mepis, and now Mint. The older base distros (Gentoo, Debian, SuSe) better pick up the pace by 100 fold or be left behind with the old folks who will still maintain them, and then slowly die away as the new generation of Linux guru's continue to expand Linux into newer arena's. But this is the way the world works -- Keep up, or stay ahead of the competition or die!.. Or do you really believe that most folks who actually use Linux on a day to day basis on thier desktop will be satisfied with the "no proprietary stuff on my distro" line of reasoning that is currently killing the older distro's? HAH! Wake up!

Barry Kauler has done what very very few could ever claim -- Create his own distro from scratch! Not just that, but a simply outstanding distro to boot with an incredibly vibrant community. Distro's like Puppy and DSL must have thier place on the list because they approach Linux with an entirely different philosophy and one that is extremely important -- functionality without the bloat! Puppy comes with a complete set of wizards, even including a "wizard wizard" which makes setups easier than just about any other bloated distro that exists today and both DSL and puppy reside in RAM completely. Those two are pretty much the only distro's im aware of that can breathe life back into your old 386 machine that was growing cobwebs, and do it well! And for you Debian cronies, DSL gets its roots from there too. The major differences being that Barry got it right with Puppy so things like youtube and DVD's work "out of the box" with no fiddling required by the user!

You are kidding arent you ?
Are you saying that this linux can run on a computer without windows underneath it, at all ? As in, without a boot disk, without any drivers, and without any services ?

That sounds preposterous to me.

If it were true (and I doubt it), then companies would be selling computers without a windows. This clearly is not happening, so there must be some error in your calculations. I hope you realise that windows is more than just Office ? Its a whole system that runs the computer from start to finish, and that is a very difficult thing to acheive. A lot of people dont realise this.

Microsoft just spent $9 billion and many years to create Vista, so it does not sound reasonable that some new alternative could just snap into existence overnight like that. It would take billions of dollars and a massive effort to achieve. IBM tried, and spent a huge amount of money developing OS/2 but could never keep up with Windows. Apple tried to create their own system for years, but finally gave up recently and moved to Intel and Microsoft.

Its just not possible that a freeware like the Linux could be extended to the point where it runs the entire computer fron start to finish, without using some of the more critical parts of windows. Not possible.

I think you need to re-examine your assumptions.