Old FUD v. New Reality

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IBM’s General Manager, e-business on demand, Ross Mauri, gave a keynote speech at LinuxWorld, in which he said that Linux is unstoppable:

“The underlying technology of Linux continues to be enhanced, expanded and improved, enabling greater security, reliability, scalability — the
essentials of first-class computing are either in Linux today, on the near-term horizon with 2.6, or coming in 2.7 and beyond.”

He was talking about using GNU/Linux in business, of course, because that is what he does, and the statistics in the article are interesting indeed.
But what about your average home user? Is Linux still too hard for your mom? For Joe SixPack, as he is sometimes called? Joe Average User?

Groklaw reader Terry Vessels has written his experiences with average users in both Windows and GNU/Linux, in an article he calls Old FUD v. New
Reality. For any of you thinking of trying GNU/Linux, but afraid to dip your toe in the water because you’ve heard it it too hard, this article is for
you. Note the helpful references at the end. You might also enjoy this brief tutorial on basic commands.

If you don’t have a copy of Linux yet, you can get a Knoppix CD, as the article explains, and have fun learning that way. The premise of the article
is that the world has changed and installing and using it today is easier than using or installing Windows. Deeper, he highlights why Linux has
developed so quickly, and it has nothing to do with someone’s legacy Unix code.

Link: groklaw.net

Category:

  • Linux