Wow.
In my experiments with Linux, some happy, some not so happy, I've figured that Linux is probably ready, or very close to ready except for one bug: compatibility.
MS OSs being the most widely available and rampantly pirated Oss around, they've become some sort of a standard. All they need to do is come up with an OS tha's completely unpiratable, and charge the earth for it (which they already do), and Linux will step right in.
The only reason MS is so big is that almost everybody runs some MS OS or the other and you might have to remain on that OS, say in a large corporation or business house.
Is Linux ready for server? Well, I'm not sure anybody will say it's not, it has a nice large deployment base and more and more x86 servers are going Linux, which is as respected as any MS server OS.
Is Linux ready for desktop? Well, I have to say yes to that, too. The new installs come with full software suites that take care of any average Joe. I find Mandrake 8.2 as easy to install as any Windows OS, and much quicker to set up. Hardware support is pretty good, at least in my case where the only thing that doesn't work is my Motorola softmodem.
Is Linux ready for pro audio? Well, sadly, no. Neither for professional imaging, desktop publishing, nor any of the most popular professional applications. That is not a Linux shortcoming, but a shortcoming of the software development industry. The WINE project, well, I'm not so sure it's a great idea anyway. There is bound to be slow and laggy response as in the case of any emulator.
My .02 is that Linux will be on the pro scene soon. MS has been around much longer, and does anyone remember MS-DOS or Win 3.11, and what you could do with that stuff? Just give it a few more years. It is going to happen, and happen soon. When it does, I for one will not go back to MS. Never.
Sang
PS: nobody can/should iron out bugs in 98. For that you have to debug MS-DOS, which is a very buggy 16-bit OS on which 98 is built in the first place. Also if all bugs in 98 were ironed out, half the applications written for it would not work anymore, as a lot of them had code that anticipated those bugs and corrected / compensated for them. You'd have to go and write fresh code for nearly every app again for it to work on 98. So consider that route closed. I however find that 2000 works the best. It's rock stable, doesn't have the flash of XP but just as stable and powerful, and supports 99% of all apps that run on 98/95, with the exception of some games.