[Windows Phone 7 General] N8ter:
Wrong. There are features that haven't been backported to older versions of Android, the same way there are Windows APIs that haven't been backported to XP, which makes porting the latest version of Windows Live Essentials to XP impossible for Microsoft. It's a fact.

The whole point of the platform moving forward is to add features. The problem with Linux is that too much breakage happens below the API level, which makes maintaning applications that run at the system level (Drivers, etc.) a PITA.

The problem is that Android breaks compatibility the same way Linux distros do, because it uses a Linux kernel and inherets many of the same issues. That is also why it takes manufacturers so long to release updates, drivers can break on a kernel upgrade, as well as applications/skins and it takes quite a bit of work to get it working again, depending on the level of breakage.

Linux marketshare is growing mostly in business, not in the consumer market, and that level of growth is non-factor.

Not to mention, that source is laughable. Linux has < 1% desktop marketshare. It's a non-factor market, and Microsoft would be retarded to devote resources to port Zune to Linux. That involves porting not only the application, but also all of their Zune [BD]/WP7 Drivers and Windows Media Codecs, as well as Windows Media DRM. It's not worth the effort, with the amount of breakage that goes on on Linux and the amount of distros/desktop environments that exist on that platform. Support, Testing, and future development would be a nightmare.

Apple isn't going to port iTunes to Linux, either.

Back in ~2001 when Loki were porting games to Linux they worked wonderfully. I remember running Quake 3 on a Linux box with a 3dfx Voodoo 16 PCI graphics card and it worked flawlessly. What killed gaming on Linux was the way the platform breaks drivers and how hostile Linux users are to proprietary drivers, codecs, and software.

The games would run well if the system didn't break on updates/upgrades so much, just like they run well on OS/X and Windows. It just not worth the time to target an OS that has [practically] so many versions, with so many different configurations, without a stable driver interface which breaks system-level components on random updates/upgrades.

I had a Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription for ~4 years, and I have been using Linux on and off since 2001. I had OpenSuSE on one of my spare machines for a while not long ago. I install it everytime there is a major version to see what advances are made (I also look at Fedora).

Yes, I use Linux, and have probably used it both for work and for play considerably more than you have.

I don't care about boot speed. Windows 7 doesn't take a minute to boot on a P4 HT machine here, so I doubt it would take that long to boot on your machine unless you have a bunch of junk loading on start up. In any case, I boot my machines up maybe once every 2 weeks. I can care less about boot speed. It says absolutely nothing about usability and user experience. Why do Linux people always talk about boot speed, like it matters that much. My mom is practically computer illiterate and even she knows Standby and Hibernate > Shut Down.

Also, Windows boot time improved as the system is used and the cache is optimized. Complaining about boot time after a Fresh Install just shows how little you know about Windows, nevermind you're trying to insinuate I don't/haven't used Linux just because you think it boots faster than Windows - which doesn't matter for 99.99% of people. L2Windows7?

Dance around the point more.