The beauty of Linux..
..is that it's (mostly) free, open, unencumbered with ads, cutesy features that don't work right, and freedom from idiotic messages that only confuse and do little to enhance security: "Do you trust this printer?" "This action contains an unspecified security flaw." In a lot of ways Linux distributions like Mint, Debian, etc. are the last bastion of freedom in the computing world and very much in the spirit of what the pioneers in the early days of computing envisioned.
If MS develops a distro, if they try to approach it with the same mentality that has given us Vista, Windows 8, etc., not only should it fail, but besides MS's extensive support network, what is the value in paying for something you can likely get better for free elsewhere? Linux isn't perfect, but in many ways it "just works" far better than anything else out there due it being a "labor of love" and not a rushed development schedule with customers that have paid for a finished product being more or less beta testers. The Linux devs create and debug features they want and that people use for the most part, and not something designed by a marketing committee or because of a rogue administrative assistant wielding their power. Maybe because of its intended market this will be different, I don't know.
As a side note, when I see a title like this one on The Register, I almost feel like the Reg is trolling us. Present an article like this to a bunch of tired, frustrated IT folk and it's like a mainstream news site announcing that a paedophile is opening a day care. I fully expected the comments to be in the triple digits and I wasn't disappointed :)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
