An average user may be an over-used expression, but it is still important to keep in mind what it means. For the most part, I agree with this article describing the average user, but I disagree about the average user's technical abilities.

Everybody uses in their arguments the yardstick of the average user. This is the user that people measure the suitability of an operating system and form their arguments around. This brought a few questions to my mind. What exactly is an average user? How are they defined? What criteria are needed to put people in an "average user" box?

For years, free-software advocates have asserted that Linux is ready for the mainstream desktop. Critics have responded that, sure, Linux has come a long way since 1991, but it’s still not for ‘average users’.

As a matter of fact, what IS the right market for Linux? The mythical Average User? No way. The average user wants a computer that performs the tasks set for it. Those people are in the market for a computer, a real, physical machine, a tangible object with a keyboard (real or imaged), a mouse (or trackpad/trackball/touchscreen), and a display screen.

Maybe not for the average corporation yet, or even the average home user, but every time Canonical releases a new version of Ubuntu (and with it comes Edubuntu), Microsoft becomes a little less the default vendor of choice for educational computing.

I often see the sentiment expressed that desktop Linux is “too hard” for the average PC user. These arguments seem to completely overlook the fact that an average PC user will never install his own operating system.

Last weekend a friend was moaning about endless problems with Windows XP on his desktop PC. We installed Ubuntu 7.04 on it. The problems went away. That started me thinking about my own "daily driver" computer, a Dell Latitude that also runs Ubuntu 7.04, and it made me realize that I hadn't thought about my laptop or its operating system in many months.

I used to think that 512 MB of RAM was enough to make the average Linux system very usable. But things change, and now I'm not even happy with 768 MB running Ubuntu 8.04.

If you are not a technical user of Linux but want to get involved with the sweeping wave of Linux/GNU operating system, Ubuntu offers you some great opportunities.