Linux is great to use at home. It can be handy at work. It's a great server operating system. But there's one other place that Linux is really worth its weight in gold: public, or semi-public, computers. There's nothing quite as nerve-wracking as seeing someone on a computer you're responsible for, and wondering what exactly they're up to.

When people are talking about "The year of Linux Desktop", it seems that there is a large crowd with no knowledge of Linux. People who use computers for a long time also replied the same thing when I talked about Linux with them. This screenshot shows the reply from an user when someone posted a reply in a form with a reference to 'Linux'

Everybody’s talking browser wars again. IE8 is out, which doesn’t matter much to Linux users, and Chrome for Linux is getting closer to being usable, which does. Webkit browsers seem to be the next big thing, even though none of them are really available yet, safe for Safari. Everything else is still in alpha/beta. Even though, people are predicting the demise of Firefox already.

As the Linux name has been filtering down from the dizzying heights of geekdom to the general mind share. I am sure that many people have been wondering exactly what this Linux thing is and what can it do for them.

As a former course designer and academic, I used to be experienced in talking in front of people. However, one thing I hadn't done until now is appear on television. That, more than anything, is why I agreed to appear on the computer show Lab with Leo Laporte in a five-minute spot about the GNU/Linux desktop.

"The Linux filesystem is a complex and the first thing that most new users shifting from Windows will find confusing is navigating the Linux filesystem. The second thing is that not too many people are familiar with how the filesystem works or know how to troubleshoot if any problems arise."

The product? The new release of the beta version of their latest ClearOS(5.1). I was expecting just another fork of another Linux distribution. You know the standard Ubuntu, Debian, SUSE, RedHat type of thing. One thing was evident was that these people were definitely thinking out of the box.

Last week, David Coursey reported that Microsoft entertainment and devices boss Robbie Bach made the prediction in an analyst briefing that Linux on mobile will lose. Why? It’s choice is a bad thing for customers and that there is too much Linux in the mobile marketplace. By Bach’s count there are 17 variants of Linux available on mobile phones. He sees this as a bad thing for customers.

One of the most common conversations when people discuss Linux is the freedom it brings. Talk of free as in beer, free as in creative expression, free as in legal widespread distribution, modification, and dissemination. These are all important and great conversations to have. One thing that doesn't get discussed a lot though, when talking about Linux is community.