All the glass clicking and cheers of late surrounding the apparent conversion of Microsoft to the open source fold needs to stop. We need the Cold War. We need Communism. And, yes, we need the OS Wars.

When you're a fan of Linux, any blog post entitled "27 Good Reasons to Love Linux" is going to be impossible to resist. No wonder, then, that a recent post with just that title has created endless fodder for conversation in the Linux blogosphere of late.

Brandon Le Blanc from Microsoft posted an interesting post about Netbooks and Linux last week. While we agreed with his comments about customers wanting choice and looking for outstanding hardware options, we disagree with much of his analysis and unsurprisingly the overall ’spin’ of the post.

This is a devils advocate post in response to my original post "Reasons your parents should use Linux". Though my original post intended to explain 5 reasons you should switch your parents to Linux, this post will address what many people have commented on in the past few days. 5 reasons why you should NOT switch your parents to Linux.

A few weeks ago, I switched my development environment from Windows to Linux, on a project which was developed so far on Windows only. In this post, I want to describe the issues that brought me to this switch, a short overview how I did the actual port, and some observations on Linux for developers.

If you read my last post, you know that - temporarily - I'm hosting Windows XP on one of the four computers plugged in here at the igloo, due to a donated computer. This post marks the 72 hour mark since I once again saw the Windows splash screen on a monitor in my home for the first time in seven years.

This is the first post in a series where I examine my ten month love affair with the Linux Operating System. These posts are aimed at everyday Windows users who are curious about Linux and Open Source. If I am not precise in my explanations, please forgive me and correct me in the comments below.

On the 10th of February I updated my original “Is Canonical becoming the new Microsoft?” post to make it clearer that what I was actually asking was about whether the company is becoming the next organisation that we love to hate. Today Sam Varghese has written about a conversation had with Mark Shuttleworth regarding my original post.

This is the second post in the article series about Unix utilities that you should know about. In this post I will introduce you to the netcat tool or simply nc.