Hi guys, had an idea that I don’t have a lot of time to do, but thought I would throw it out to the community since I thought it was a cool idea.

OpenOffice 3's release candidate is here and ready for download for Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, and Windows. This is more than a little cool. Those of us who don't like paying the Microsoft Office suite tax have been waiting for the next version of OpenOffice for some time now and it's almost ready to go.

Much thought went into writing the first line of this article. I thought about a lot of things to say that would probably sound smart or at least vaguely intelligent--then I thought better if it. You are here to learn about templating, aren't you? Let's get right to it then.

The other day I wrote an article about the right and wrong ways to bring a user to the Linux world. I stand by my position there, namely that as an IT professional, even if someone’s not ready to embrace Linux as their desktop OS of choice, I still will recommend it down the road… but not until someone is truly ready to take that plunge.

Years ago I already played a bit with Linux (It was Redhat 5.0 on my 386). At that time I thought the operating system wasn't yet ready for the desktop and after a while I reinstalled Windows. Things changed when Ubuntu 5.04 was released. This was the first time I really enjoyed Linux; the most important things worked, it was easy and it was just great!

The title of this post is a search which came into my site, verbatim. It's a good way of looking at things for a change. So much ink is devoted to "Linux is ready for the desktop", that we tend to forget to view things from the other angle - what kind of user is right for Linux?

Sometimes all it takes to foment innovation may be an idea that sounds cool. When Romanian developer Bogdan Radulescu first ran into what would eventually be known as OpenOffice.org, he says, "I thought it was pretty cool. I had no idea at that time what is open source.

I thought it was time to post a screenshot of how Amarok2 development is moving along.

As my focus is on the service integration, I have chosen to show a few of the new things that are happening in this area, as well as some of the more general and cool stuff that is being worked on.

After countless, endless hours of nagging on my part, my girlfriend finally put Linux on her laptop. I thought it would be interesting to hear what a long-time Windows-using non-programmer thinks of Linux (Kubuntu in this case) after a few weeks of use. So I interviewed her. Read on. My thoughts and conclusions are at the end.