Apart from Games, what does Linux fail at?
Linux doesn't necessarily "fail" at anything (other than gaming, but that's mostly due to the fact that no one
makes games for linux (see above "too many flavors/versions for mainstream popularity" remark)), it's quite good at a lot of stuff. It's different than Windows, it's different from its special cousin MacOS. It does some things better, some things worse; some aspects of the user experience are better, others are worse.
If any of my posts have come across as "Linux is teh sux0r!", then I worded them poorly. Linux is great for lots of people, but so is Windows, and so is MacOS. I have my own preferences and stick with those.
You'll note though that when fistful asked his questions in this thread, no one responded with simply: "
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/".
Edited to add:One example of something I feel Linux does worse (again,
mostly a result of the "too many versions" thing). If Joe Blow writes a program for linux that I'd like to try, but that is not something easily downloaded say through Ubuntu's little application updater/downloader, it is much, much more complicated than windows or mac.
Either it's straight source code or it's in a distribution package or binary that doesn't easily play well with my particular flavor of Linux; either way, I've either got to learn how to compile a program to binary in linux (a hill too steep for most users), or in the latter case spend time on forums figuring out how to get distribution package X to work on Linux flavor Y.
In Windows, I just download it and run/install it. This isn't a fault of the Linux OS itself, it's more due to the fact there
is no "Linux." There's Ubuntu Linux, Gentoo Linux, SuSE Linux, etc.