Well, as someone who's a happy windows user, I don't understand why a bad experience with MSN (haven't hear anyone talk about MSN for some time) would mean ditching the OS too. M$ produced some very poor operating systems at one time, but windows 7 has been a very smooth experience and has MSN been a problem? No. I don't use it.

So, move to linux, by all means, but a ton of workarounds to keep using windows software, because of MSN seems rather pointless. Of course, Brian may simply prefer Linux over windows, and that's a reasonable position, but MSN as a reason to move to Linux? The reasoning baffles me.