Hello,
i would agree that with WinXP things have changed for the better, however most older office workers in Germany were very reluctant regarding PCs at all, and when they were now told to switch from Windows to another system "OH MY GOD LINUX ??!! ... and my older MS mouse already has so much buttons !! ??"
I guess the german government did not spend too much money in training people for the new Linux systems as well.
That said i first used CP/M, then DR-DOS with its Graphic environment manager desktop GEM, and then OS/2, Windows, and Linux. From the desktop Windows always was a mere second, and all "improvements" in the Win Gui could be found on those others years earlier - copied, to say it directly.
"But Windows 95 has SAM mode !!" They never understood that you did not need this in OS/2, it all worked in internal virtual machines, without a reboot. Certainly also in Unix/Linux. The biggest joke was that Windows applications performed better under OS/2, than on an installed Windows OS versions of the time.
And then how MS took over the market e.g. in Goettingen where i lived.
Imagine an MS agent visiting a PC store:
Mickeysoft: "So you sell your PCs with either Win 95 or OS/2 ?"
Store owner: "Yes"
Mickeysoft: "How much do you sell, in percent ?"
Store owner: "Roughly 75 percent MS, 25 percent OS/2 but its increasing."
Mickeysoft: "As long as you sell or give away OS/2, we will not deliver any MS product to you any more."
I saw and heard that, indeed i was one of those store owners.
This is just to show how competition works, and why you do not get the good things in the long run, but mediocre crap. Thinking of Win 3.1 and Win 95 here.
It was only after XP that i really changed my home PC, and then only for games like Silent Hunter etc.. As soon as they produce sims for Linux, MS can rot in its own proprietary *.dll hell.
I bet most people complaining about Unix/Linux have no f** idea how it works, and where its advantages lie - from the console model (i mean even Apple uses this since - how long ? as "deskspace"), or virtual machines.
And make no mistake, in the internet Unix and Linux Apache servers rule, MS servers are far too slow for real heavy net traffic. It's ok for an intranet, but not for real speed data line relays.
I am running Win 7 now, and even this has not the functionality of the old OS/2, when it comes to work. But at least MS improves in making their GUI look like OS/2, after all they only had 20 years of time for that
Greetings,
Catfish
P.S: B.t.w. being administrator in Win 7 but not being allowed to change and even see all kinds of things, along with the impossible internal "order" of how they organized this ... Gaawwwwd

And the policy editor still does not work properly, in a Win7 business LAN the user rights are a chore to manage, which often leads to ...
astonishing results.