For some time, Windows Vista’s perceived failure has given Linux a free ride. It has been nice, but it will not remain. From the looks of things, Windows 7 will be a solid release for Microsoft, possibly even one of the best. With this competition, what does Linux need to stay competitive?

1. More Pre-Install Deals For so long, Linux has spread through people installing it on random computers. Although this has gotten fairly easy, there are still so many problems. First, it is practically impossible to support all of the harware out there. Second, most people just don’t install their own OSs – they buy new computers with the OS pre-installed. For both these reasons and more, Linux needs more computers shipping with it pre-installed.
2. Better Netbook Distros Some people are saying that Windows 7 will crush Linux on netbooks, which might be true, except that the difference in quality between the original Eee PC Linux distro and the kind of stuff you will be seeing by the time Windows 7 has been released will be huge. That said, it is important to improve Linux distributions for netbooks so that Linux continues to dominate netbooks.
3. Better Out-of-the-Box Experience When I got my M1530 from Dell with Ubuntu, most stuff worked great, but a few things still needed some tweaking to get working. That tweaking should be done before I got the machine. The user should open the PC and have it work.
4. Better Windows Compatibility No matter if it means improving OpenOffice, improving WINE, or promoting Windows virtual machines, compatibility with Windows and Mac OS X has to be perfect. Without this, many people will be unable to switch to Linux or have initial unfavorable impressions, which may shape their views on Linux.
5. Make Companies Offering Linux Comfortable to Promote It Unfortunately, Dell has hidden Ubuntu away for the most part and almost pretended it does not exist, despite offering it on some of their PCs. I cannot claim to know the exact reasons why, but companies like Canonical need to find out and solve any problems that can be solved, so that Linux can get some good promotion through hardware companies.