Let me admit that I’m not an Ubuntu fan. This is not because that it’s getting all the limelight in the Linux world and I am a Fedora user. I don’t use it much becuase it’s too user-friendly. Yes, it’s so user-friendly that I’m not getting the fun of using Linux. No doubt after a brief stint with RedHat9 in my teens, it’s Ubuntu 6.04 which made me Linux lover again.

Mark Shuttleworth, the man at the helm of Canonical and Ubuntu, went into greater detail last week about his thoughts on making future Ubuntu releases more user-focused. In the past, Shuttleworth has made no pretense that he feels Apple has, historically, offered a superior user experience.

SUSE has been around almost since the dawn of consumer-level desktop Linux, and openSUSE 11 upholds the SUSE reputation for having not just a wide range of available applications, but also excellent documentation and a fine user-to-user support community. For this video we chose the KDE 4.x desktop option. KDE 3.5x and GNOME are also available as defaults in openSUSE.

Opinion: When running a Linux system, a user relies on the creator of the Linux distribution to provide them with a stable, fast, secure and bug-free experience. But given the experience of recent weeks, it may be worth considering how that user makes sure that's what they get.

FileZilla 3 was just released and I have to admit that I’m pretty excited to see my favorite FTP client hit this big milestone. This version has spent several years in the making, and even though it doesn’t have many new features over the previous version there is something that is definitely worth noting: it’s now cross-platform!

If Google does not sign up to the User Generated Content guidelines created by the big players in the movie and video entertainment business, could this mean the start of the end of YouTube? And of free video sharing services as we know them?

It is important to understand how Linux user accounts work. There are GUI tools for this within GNOME and KDE but here we lift the lid on the bonnet to show what really makes a user exist, and what these commands are doing to your filesystem.

Compiz Fusion is the best thing that happened to Linux desktop user experience yet. In the world of Linux bashers who argue that Linux is not quite ready for home users; compiz is one of the few things that really set Linux apart from other OS with major market share.

There's no dearth of Linux distributions for desktop users or even for running high availability servers. But if you are a do-it-yourself computer user, your choice of Linux distros is fairly limited. You can build Linux from scratch with Linux from Scratch or compile your own set of packages with Gentoo.