Windows already has a quite good Media Player at this point, and it’s a sure bet most Windows users won’t seek out Banshee to use over the already installed (and much better) built in Windows Media Player 11.

If anything, I’d like to see some WMP11-esque functionality in Banshee, such as the more visual “Album Cover” views with the stacking and such, ability to select by genre, artist, etc… without having to create “smart playlists” and some cool visualizations would be nice to have.

Not knocking Banshee at all, it’s a fine start but miles away from WMP11. I’d hold off a port until it were somewhat closer in feature-sets… (or really, not do it at all for the aforementioned reason)

> MSI packages has been the 2nd largest blocker for Firefox adoption

yet strangely there has been enough enthusiasm to add it and not much in the way of third party developers offering to make it happen by action or sponsorship

I’m waiting for bucking fig package with GTK and a whole load of GTK (and maybe even Gnome) apps before I even suggest anyone invest their time in an MSI package. It might be motivation to provide an MSI for the purpose bundling as much Freedom Software as possible.
Bundling works, and has undeniably been a huge factor in the success of Microsoft, and if anyone is dedicated enough to do that work of MSI packaging I’d strongly encourage them to use their leverage to promote more than single application and go the whole hog to create a Ximian like meta distribution of applications for Windows. Blue skies dreamin’? Probably.

I didn’t install too much and so generally only saw the UAC dialogs where it was relatively sane, but the thing that annoyed me the most was how much everything was fragmented compared to XP.

For example: in XP, you can go to the “Display” control panel where you have five tabs and can easily change everything you need. Vista has decided to take each of the tabs in that window and place them under their own separate control panels. They didn’t even remove the tabs, so you have five different windows, but with one tab in them each. It looks ridiculous.

For some reason, Vista also comes by default with this odd sidebar thing on the desktop which shows a clock (in case you missed the one in the system tray) and a distracting rotating slideshow of stock photos. The worrying thing is just how many regular computer users never ever touch the default Windows settings and will end up suffering this sort of extraneous junk.

Plus it ran unbelievably slow on a normally unbelievably fast VMware server, though you could well put that down to Vista virtualisation not being fully supported quite yet..

As for installers, I can happily recommend NSIS.

Maybe you are right about the advantages of Gnome, Linux and Free Software in general. But let´s face facts: People are not interested in operating systems and desktops. They are interested in applications. That´s what they need to get their job done, that´s what they use to bring their imagination to life.

I´m talking about applications like Final Cut Studio, Aperture, Photoshop, Mellel, Montage, Journler, Logic and Reason. Professional creativity apps for the Mac, actually, but there are counterparts available for Windows. But Linux just cannot compete here.

You see, that is my biggest issue with Linux: I´ve been watching the progress of Linux since the late nineties, and every year since then I´ve played with two or three current distributions. I installed them, tried to get all my hardware running, looked at the applications – and erased Linux again from my hard disk. Why? Whenever I want to actually do something with it, I discover that there’s no software for me. And I guess I´m not the only one out there with that feeling. For OS X and Windows I find the software that I need. But maybe I also “live in a box of delusion”?

As for your review of Vista I can only do my best impression of Nelson Muntz and say “Ha ha!”. You certainly aren’t the first to point and laugh at those Continue Cancel dialogs.