It's a case of you get what you pay for. For the specs, it's a decent price. A machine running linux at 1.6Ghz and 1GB of RAM is fine for surfing the web, reading e-mail, etc. and basic stuff like that is all some people want to do. Don't know what "buggy" things other people are referring to about. I find Linux less buggy than vista.

I dual-boot those, and same here.

The education, basic office and home e-mail checker market probably accounts for well over half of PCs. None of those uses above what is given here (if you use Linux). I don't see why that 50% of the market doesn't switch now: it's much cheaper, there's no compatibility issues like gamers have and if you never change anything there's no problems with ease of use (not that I believe it's hard to do if you want to change something).

Lots of  monitors are  <$150.

 Many of them don't even know what an OS is...

Beside that, there are few quirks here and there on some stuffs, particularly connecting to the Internet. I'm running Ubuntu and my wireless internet connection keeps getting disconnected, especially when running bittorrent.

Other than that, I like Ubuntu more than Windows.  

Plus, pretty much all the prebuilt PCs and laptops you see at local stores have Windows preinstalled.

 At a quick glance at newegg.com (I'm not american, so I forgive me if they aren't the cheapest, I don't know where you guys buy stuff), the cheapest LCD was $145. Most 17" screens were inbetween the $150-200 mark.

My monitor (CRT) was about $100. Sure CRT's may be dying, but since LCD's have ghosting and a low refresh rate (isn't it like 75htz?), they strain my eyes pretty badly. I tried a very nice 19" Acer LCD with an 8ms response time, but even that felt like I was playing with a HUGE blur and it made me sick to even attempt to play any games.

Fast foward to the past year or two and with my major, CRT monitors are better for the things I'm doing because if I were to take a job in graphical design and printing, CRT's are better because the colors are better than on LCD's which is good for proofing. 

While I too consider CRTs superior to LCDs in regards to image quality, the average person would not consider it to outweigh the benefits of an LCD.

In regards to refresh rates, an LCD refreshing is different to a CRT and it alone is unlikely to be causing strain on your eyes. CRTs require a higher refresh rate due to the fact that if the phosphors aren't refreshed quickly, they fade to black. LCDs on the other hand have their pixels on constantly and change their colours between pixels without turning them off. This is why LCDs suffer ghosting and do not flicker (if you can see flicker, it is because of a cheap and crappy backlight).

There are also LCDs geared towards gaming these days with 2ms refresh times. I personally own a 24" dell monitor with a 6ms response and while it has the odd ghosting, I can't say I've really noticed unless I've gone looking for it. Anyway, there aren't too many CRTs that do 100hz+ at 1920x1200 (or similar 4:3 res).

My household has more than it's fair share of useless monitors sitting around, I might actually consider getting this :P We need a good internet PC, and I'm pretty sure Unbutu would install onto this. That seems like a pretty damn awesome deal to me :) Although with the hardware set-up I'm not sure if I'd get any of the cool flashy effects that some linux aps can offer :P

The wobbly windows and such even run on Intel integrated graphics found in laptops, so it's a safe bet they'll work on this.

The linux PCs aren't going to kill microsoft overnight but they will start doing more and more damage.

The main reason this makes me happy is because now you buy a PC that you don't build yourself which doesn't automatically come with windows. If I wanted a linux computer a year ago I would have to buy a computer which means paying microsoft and then install linux and M$ still wins. Now we take them out of the equation.