I just want to drop a line about what I believe to be the future biggest problems of the Linux community: people who believe to have a clue but don’t (and who will misguide people in the process)

Linux: It’s fast, it’s free, but is it time to load into your PC? Maybe not quite yet. Recent revisions of the software make it easier to overcome the biggest hurdle for the non-techie users — installation — but it is still an operation that will take lots of time and may just be beyond the skills of the average user.

This was a "you had to be there" event. We captured all the award presentations and some of the byplay, but most of the fun took place off-camera, and maybe a "What happens at the Community Choice Awards stays at the CCA" attitude is better than trying to show you all the game-playing, drinking, eating, drinking, tattooing, drinking, socializing, and drinking that went on.

The biggest problem most people have with making The Big Move from Windows to Linux, indeed the problem I had, is the One Critical App. But my open source ideology and stubbornness got the better of me, and despite my sobriety I got some WINE.

The three biggest community Linuxes are Fedora, OpenSUSE and Ubuntu. They're all popular. They're all good. But which is the best?

Over the last week I have read numerous articles bemoaning the sad state of Linux documentation, and I have to say - I am on board. Linux is an outstanding operating system. There is very little it can not do. The biggest problem (especially for the new user) is getting there.

In the Big Physics community, Linux is quite popular. Having met with numerous groups, Linux almost always comes up as a topic of discussion and in many cases it’s part of their labs roadmap for rolling out control, test, and other systems. The first issue is cost. Microsoft Windows costs $100 or more for each computer and when you have hundreds of systems, it adds up to real money fast.

Firefox ... we use it all day, for everything from managing finances to socializing to playing games. But it's a large and complicated programs. Are you getting the most out of your browser?

In an open-source business, a vendor's biggest competition often derives from a freely available, "community" version of its product. By extension, an open-source vendor's biggest competition comes from the systems integrators that provide implementation services around that vendor's community software.