Apparently you don’t have to be terribly bright to be student of psychology. One Vlad Dolezal recently blogged that he’d worked out why Linux isn’t taking the desktop world by storm: it’s because it’s free. His theory goes that people choose Windows over Linux because Windows costs money, and is therefore perceived as being more valuable than the free-as-in-beer Linux.

The fact that there are versions of Linux that aren’t free tends to blow his theory out of the water, but there is a much simpler explanation for the lack of Linux’s success in the desktop market: it’s because it’s crap, and I say that as a Linux user. Linux handles most of my computing needs very well, but there are still a number of Windows apps I use from time to time for which there is no Linux equivalent. For those apps I use a Windows virtual machine, but this not a sensible arrangement for most people - in fact it’s downright insane.