@Glaucus
Yeah, but only experienced users should ber messing with the registry, and some of them really shouldn't be either. There are times when you can tweak things by editing the registry, but i've never seen a case where it's absolutely necessary to edit a registry. It's not like you need to edit the registry every time you install something. Sure some things might get left behind when you uninstall, but so what, hard drives are big and cheap these days!
It's not a question of hard drive space. It's a question of obsolete configurations, or Windows refusing to install something properly because you had it installed before and the uninstall process failed. It's a question of programs you try out and can't then get rid of because they install themselves to start up automatically and have no uninstaller. It's a question of adware and spyware installing itself without giving the user the option of removing it.
Sure, if nothing ever goes wrong you wouldn't need to touch the registry, but things
do go wrong and the only way to fix them short of re-installing the whole OS from scratch is to edit the registry.
As for re-installing the whole OS, that not only sucks, but takes much longer to do than Linux (re-install+reconfigure). You should not have to re-install Linux, but doing so is easy because all the confugurations are held in the user's home directory (and therefore don't have to be wiped) while in Windows it's all in the registry, which is often the very reason why you have to re-install Windows in the first place.
I must admit, I've tried Linux a number of times over the years and always found it lacking, so I went back to Windows. However, after WinXP gave me incomprehensible problems again a couple of months ago I switched to the latest Mandrake and now I find it perfectly adequate for all my daily usage. There are still some specialised programs that I can only use in Windows, but then I rarely have to use them anyway.
One thing to note is that I can have a multi-functional system out-of-the-box, without having to pay huge amounts of money to achieve the same functionality with Windows applications. I'm happy that Linux is capable of being a home desktop system already, and I'm no expert. I have absolutely no doubt that it will continue to improve and that the Red Hat CEO's statement is deliberately setting out to damage a sector they no longer cover.
