Yes, people are very conservative... They expect Linux to be the same as Windows, from the GUI downwards..
Then you have the people who don't know anything about their system. A girl once told me her hard drive had 512 mb... (and her computer is fairly recent, so she was mistaking RAM for hard disk space)... And given that a large proportion of us teenagers just use the pc for games...this gives Linux a large disadvantage.. I have switched to open source games (just finished gl-117), and I love them, but I doubt my friends will! Wine definitely needs to improve in this regard...
