For some reason, the Linux community simply doesn't understand what Caesar was saying when he invented the very successful strategy of "Divide and Conquer"; this does not mean that one needs to split up his own troops, but this means that the troops of the enemy should be divided, so that your mighty large army can come and squash those silly small troops. Right now, Linux is nothing more than a bunch of silly small troops. I am not the only one pointing this out, and attempts have been made to make this possible. However, they were all in vain. Yet, people are more than ever saying that Linux should unite. And these aren't any longer only small fish, but even an executive of Redhat has recently declared that Linux should unite. And he is right.
Linux also needs to leave behind their ubergeek image. Configuration panels are there for disciples, not the geeks. So don't confront them with options that they would never set. Simply because as soon as one knows what the option is for, one would already have reached such a high level of experience with this operating system that one would be able to simply alter the desired files directly. So keep it simple and stupid.
Innovation is another thing that Linux lags. Linux is a copy of a lot of other things, all pieced together. This is not immediately something bad. However, it needs to be done right. When you copy, you need to innovate, or at least, make a good copy. It is no use to reinvent the wheel, so don't do it. But don't copy it and think that a square wheel will do the job as well. For example, look at Abiword, KOffice and OpenOffice. If you throw them all together, you would end up with a more than wonderful package. Leave them as they are now, and they all represent both a small amount of good value and a huge bunch of real annoyances. To tell you the truth, Word will remain my favourite editor for quite some time (oh, and before you start to doubt my credibility, I'm using Word on my trusty iBook running OS X Panther). So please, now is the time to unite. Well, actually, it was yesterday, but you all seemed to have missed the train.
Some other huge things where Linux lags behind is the fact that they have the urge to bundle every possible application and that they are terrible at localising their software. There's nothing like a distro like Ubuntu. It is small, easy to install and without too many options to set. No filling up your hard disk with useless programs, but most of them are simply necessary programs of a very high quality. This should become the standard for Linux, however, due to the broad range of different ways to install software under Linux, this is not yet truly achievable. The only exception is when you offer a large website with installation packages or when you offer a central repository. In both cases, these things cost a lot of money to maintain.
The other deficiency that Linux has, is even more important than the one I just stated. It is their localisation. Getting Linux to work in English is no big deal, however, trying out other languages is a huge challenge. For example, go ahead and try to get it all running in Dutch. Dutch is no small language, with over 30 million people who have it as their native tongue. Yet, getting a version of Linux that is in Dutch is harder than ever. Not often you are confronted with bad translations, or, even worse, half translations. When it comes to trusting an operating system, I can tell you that there is no trusting a system that can't even get the translations right. Therefore, why not move to the Apple way of doing things, and make every program de-facto multi-lingual? Truly, Linux lags way behind here. Windows works like a charm, OS X does it even better (allowing two users on the same computer to operate in different languages), but Linux, well, it can zijn better. (and no, the last part of this phrase does not include a clerical error. It is the Linux way of saying things in other languages).
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