> There are still a few things that prevent me from switching exclusively to
> Linux. One is that the on-screen font rendering is not as good. Maybe there
> are licensing issues that prevent this, but in my opinion the page rendering
> in Nestcape or Mozilla, for example, is ugly, and most other apps are not
> much easier to read.

Sounds like you've been running the old versions of Gnome or KDE.  These
days both have antialiased fonts and look VERY nice.  In the old days I
would definalty agree that the fonts in netscape were horrible.
The old school fix was to change out the fonts for a better set, then
things looked pretty good.

> Another is the constant firehose of "updates." Most
> people want to use their OS, not tinker with it. These days an OS is more
> like an appliance than a hobby. Until the open-source community gets that
> through their heads, Linux will never be a serious contender for the
> consumer desktop.

Windows has a similar firehose, and if you don't realize that, you have
a horribly insecure system.
These days all the major distros have a way to automaticly grab updates
and install them with just a click of a button, and 99% of your updates
can come from one source.  You could even be really insane and put them
in a cron job and have your system just get updated automatically,
although I don't recommend it.

Brian Cluff