Linux.com

This is a good article, and as a free for life advisor to many people with Windows machines I'm thinking of taking the same stand. I often tell my (Windows) techie friend when he asks that Linux suits your mum/dad/grandma better than Windows, as long as they have access to someone like me prepared to do the occasional bit of sysadmin for them, but it's true that the need for that is less and less as time goes on, and it's easy to set up openssh-server to do most things remotely. I tell him it also suits the knowledge-hungry geek who wants to dig into their computer and know more about everything. The people it doesn't suit (yet) are the Windows power-users.

The point about people buying new computers to replace "broken" old ones is so true. One thing that crystalized in my mind while reading this article is that most non-techies I speak to think that computers actually physically wear out or degrade and have to be replaced. This is no doubt partly because that's true of many more mechanical devices, partly because of the way a Windows system degrades over time, and partly a win for the MS/hardware industry marketing propagandists. I need to start *explicitly* correcting that fallacy along with the other usual ones about how when your PC gets old and slow you need to add a bigger hard disk...

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