As you say there are not many technical issues standing in the way for main stream adoption. Personally I do not believe that there are ANY purely technical issues in the way. I really think that what most people do not know the difference between a brand and the technology that the brand uses.

Gaming is a big issue for most users. I love to play 3D games. The problem is that most of the big name games do not run on GNU+Linux. The marketing and branding issue raises it's ugly head and that is the end of the issue for me. id is the huge exception to that rule in many cases. How ever to take it any further is to confuse what I believe the issue to be. ie Branding and marketing in case you did not see it before.

Nettops: They maybe a back door to GNU+Linux desktop adoption. As they are marketed just for surfing the Internet and emailing. This topic portion of the topic needs further discussion as I see the online storage, cloud computing, and SAS to be a hindrance here. I personally would very much like a nettop like say a eeepc, that I can very soon put Mandriva on. Anyway if I had such a device it would be a componant to my desktop for storage and online apps would not be a factor. Used this way the Nettop like device would only have technical issues to deal with in backing up data on what ever distro I want to back it up to. As soon as you add win32 applications you are in a branding issue that is only disguised as technical. The proliferation of Nettop like devices will educate users to these issues. As long as their heads are not in the clouds.

I would be interrested to hear what others have to say.