Uhhh, Steve... you took my post a bit out of context. For the average user (and trust me, the average user is not computer inclined... I've dealt with so many...) a windows xp install, no matter how well secured and setup to begin with can easily be destroyed in months (sometimes weeks, in the case of my inquisitive father).
For the more experience/knowledgable user, XP can run quite stable for sometime. I havent had any problems with my XP install for 8 months now... oh, btw - a new fave site of mine:
www.free-av.com
For desktop setups, suse 9.0 personal and redhat 8.0 were/are pretty decent. I didnt like suse personally, because I dislike the packaged browser and installing another browser is a bit of a pain. The average user couldnt handle it. Although, the suse install was quite easy, I am sure a trained monkey could do it
As for linux not conquering the desktop world due to bad marketing and lack of funds... well, I think the real killer for linux is that the vast majority of games can not be run on it. This kills the linux desktop market entirely, imho.
Calling linux nothing more then hacker porn is wayyyy off base though. The majority of webservers run some flavour of linux. The majority of universities run linux on their clusters and a large number of businesses utilise linux and mysql for database work.... and so on and so on.
And finding linux people is really easy actually. Just look for your local linux users group. They seem to be quite prolific.
Of course, I am a bit biased... less then 1% of our webservers run windows (just one windows box on my network!)