Most of you lot are missing my point- All of this is in my opinion 
The original Windows comment was far more in my experience than anything else, might have been clearer in the thread I linked to?
Anyway, another extremely major reason why Windows is at its current size is because of the preinstall factor- It comes on pretty much every prebuilt machine. If Linux came on all of these machines, and had for the same length of time, we would be having this discussion about it, and the same for OSX. Its a sad fact that Windows is the only OS the vast majority of people will have learnt on, and this means they will be biased towards it.
NathanE- Its certainly possible for a user mode application to cause a full-on BSOD. Now I don't pretend to understand how most of either the Windows or for that matter Linux kernel works, but its entirely possible for apps which run in user mode to kill off the system. Yes, in theory it shouldn't, but if it hits a bug or something, its perfectly possible. Even a simple memory leak can kill off the system if its not noticed, and thats perfectly possible in user mode. Many of these crashes may depend on certain conditions being met, but how else would a crash occur? By magic? (IE. Memory leak with a manual page file size, can easily cause a BSOD when Windows simply runs out of memory)
Linux drivers- What would you call a kernel module, if not a driver? Where are you trying to make the distinction?
As for having to call a segfault if a driver crashes, not true, but it does depend on precisely the driver & the nature of the crash. Segfaulting is accessing invalid memory location IIRC, and this is certainly not the cause of all crashes. Again, I'm not totally privy to the inner workings of the kernel, but in the recent past, I've crashed TV card drivers, the Nvidia driver & a couple of others. The Nvidia driver killed off the X-Server and dumped me on the console, the TV card driver killed the app I was trying to use at the time, but neither killed the system completely.
Its certainly possible to set the whole system up to segfault when something crashes, but it should be somewhere in the kernel config options, and does not necessarily come as default. Remeber, the sole use for Linux is not mission critical systems where data should be protected at all costs
-Leezer-
The original Windows comment was far more in my experience than anything else, might have been clearer in the thread I linked to?Anyway, another extremely major reason why Windows is at its current size is because of the preinstall factor- It comes on pretty much every prebuilt machine. If Linux came on all of these machines, and had for the same length of time, we would be having this discussion about it, and the same for OSX. Its a sad fact that Windows is the only OS the vast majority of people will have learnt on, and this means they will be biased towards it.
NathanE- Its certainly possible for a user mode application to cause a full-on BSOD. Now I don't pretend to understand how most of either the Windows or for that matter Linux kernel works, but its entirely possible for apps which run in user mode to kill off the system. Yes, in theory it shouldn't, but if it hits a bug or something, its perfectly possible. Even a simple memory leak can kill off the system if its not noticed, and thats perfectly possible in user mode. Many of these crashes may depend on certain conditions being met, but how else would a crash occur? By magic? (IE. Memory leak with a manual page file size, can easily cause a BSOD when Windows simply runs out of memory)
Linux drivers- What would you call a kernel module, if not a driver? Where are you trying to make the distinction?
As for having to call a segfault if a driver crashes, not true, but it does depend on precisely the driver & the nature of the crash. Segfaulting is accessing invalid memory location IIRC, and this is certainly not the cause of all crashes. Again, I'm not totally privy to the inner workings of the kernel, but in the recent past, I've crashed TV card drivers, the Nvidia driver & a couple of others. The Nvidia driver killed off the X-Server and dumped me on the console, the TV card driver killed the app I was trying to use at the time, but neither killed the system completely.
Its certainly possible to set the whole system up to segfault when something crashes, but it should be somewhere in the kernel config options, and does not necessarily come as default. Remeber, the sole use for Linux is not mission critical systems where data should be protected at all costs
-Leezer-
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And it still isn't as good as Show Desktop 
It's a one shot deal and after that it reverts to the previous state.
