point to be noticed is that the president of free software foundation europe had visited mumbai and I had the fortune to spend a couple of days with him. he was telling me how fast most of the european countries are moving towards free software in all aspects, specially education, government administration, and serious business. infact M$ officials had to come over to fsf and humbally request for making people use windows along with gnu/linux. another point worth noting is that except accounting and to a very great extent "extrem gaming ", there is nothing one can't do on the desktop on professional level. as I said consistency, efficiency and ease of use is the reason gnu/linux is to be used on the desktop, that is the professional way at least as what I find. and when errors come and I press ctrl alt delete and then probably restart my machine, the problem goes away. this is completely unprofessional and a potential time bomb. so even if my m$ old apps are going to run this way, at least professional people like me whos time is valuable won't like it. so I leave this question to the readers if they would use softwares which may do your work today and won't do it tomorrow with no reason or will they take some efords to learn a few new things (which is nothing to do with programming ), and get huge paybacks in the long run. regards, Krishnakant.