beauty

I've also used OpenSSI on my desktop. Turned my home PC and my server and another desktop that all remain idle most of the time into a almost single-image cluster.

With those I've run into problems with propriatory drivers.. but not free ones. The only problem with free ones is that I setup a Xen server and had issues with the IVTV with for the my Hauppauge PVR-250.

Good thing I've gotten rid of my Nvidia card, eh?

I wanted to have it mostly for Mythtv, but also have it for a little website and I wanted to have very isolated security context for it. On OS X with Parrellels it's very popular to run Linux and Microsoft on a VM for more technically oriented people and that is very specificly a desktop operating system. Nowadays it works fine.

In the future the software is improving and nowadays more and more distros are providing Xen functionality by default. There is absolutely no reason why Xen should not be a supported platform for Linux and there are plenty of reasons why you'd want that.

The future of Linux is tied very close to virtualization and it's flexible archectecture. Running Windows in Xen is a nice way to get 100% compatability for legacy applications that people need for their desktop, but don't have the source code aviable for.

Propriatory drivers are good for getting users to adopt Linux and providing nessicary functionality people require for video cards (which is the only thing you need propriatory drivers for nowadays.. you can find open source drivers for every other type of hardware without much issue) but they are definately holding linux back in a very technical and pragmatic sense.

Look how it's holding back X.org development in regards to AIGLX. Free software drivers for the Intel and ATI r2xx-r4xx series video cards support the extensions nessicary since the beginning. The same can't be said for the Nvidia propriatory drivers and it's even very much worse for the ATI propriatory drivers.

You have the full source to the nv driver, but good luck playing doom 3 with that setup.