He'll probably change. His "winding up" is just an impressionable child copying an older child :)

If he's not dumb he'll soon see which OS runs the applications he wants, just as he'll see, like my son does, that the latest game doesn't run very well on creaking hardware. There's no point sending him to school winding up the other kids that they haven't got an abacus. They'll soon catch on that their Quad core / 8800 GTX that's running 50 modern games is better.

You need to be a bit older before you start to believe it when you kid yourself that having the most toys doesn't matter. "I never wanted a good looking wife....I like small cars....the thing I like about cleaning toilets is you are your own boss, can RIchard Branson say that? Linux does everything I want it to...no I don't want to do that...nor that...ooh look linux now does it, so ok I'll do it, but I didn't lie before ok..." :)

My son has happily used linux and windows from around 2 yo. The first things he learned to read, shortly after he started, were 'sounds' 'icons' 'loading please wait' and stuff like that.

He didn't really care one way or the other about the OS. He just dual booted as necessary to get to whatever application it was he wanted to use. No "windows is better" "linux is better" nonsense, it was just a computer.

Today, his time on the computer aged 8 is split between messaging family / web browsing / creating game content [albeit relatively simple] / playing games / creating content like stop motion animations.

Thus he sees linux's flaw - he can't play (m)any games on it, and even the games he could play [e.g Id software and neverwinter nights for example] he can't use the tools to create his own simple maps / levels because they aren't ported. Level creation formed a huge part of his time using neverwinter nights.

So, he rarely if ever uses linux now. What he wants, always, is new applications / new games / new content. What he never worries about is what OS he runs. Except he can, without kidding himself, without any of the "big bad MS" or other baggage that most OS advocates carry around with them, is that linux can't do some of the things he wants to use the computer for and that he's seen and used running on windows. Not the usual nonsense that's touted as the reason for linux not being adopted - office apps or interoperability or other dull, generic software. No, the software that open source has largely no chance of delivering. It would need 3rd party proprietary developers to adopt the platform. The same reason that no one uses the Mac. No matter that linux and mac can get John Carmack's interest....he still doesn't deliver properly on the platforms, and he's not enough by himself.

As a contrast, he happily uses thunderbird and firefox, the gimp, audacity and vlc - this isn't someone who has no knowledge of open source applications, or linux.

Linux adoption for the future generation doesn't need Dell - the majority of problems with linux adoption are all application-related not operating system / hardware related.

The very fact that it doesn't matter a tinker's cuss to an 8 year old, unless his parents are daft enough to make it matter and get him childishly winding people up about what OS they run is in linux's favour.

Where it loses is, at some point the question will be something like "can I play team fortress 2?" and then you lose.