Last night was the local Blug meeting, and as always it was a good and thought provoking talk. This month we had Bart Massey down from Portland talking about Linux history, where we are and where we need to go. He had some very interesting points.

An article published in iTWire titled 'Opinion: why Linux sucks at being user friendly' has been drawing a lot of attention recently. I am going to start by responding to each of the author's points and then pointing out what I think the overall problem is.

I do agree with him that Linux sucks. It just sucks a lot less than the alternatives. His presentation brought me to thinking about writing more about the bad parts of Linux in the future instead of where it's good.

There have been a couple of thought-provoking columns that have been published recently that I wanted to add my own two cents. Not that the authors of these missives were completely wrong in their conclusions, But I think some added perspective is needed to highlight that their points, while having some validity, still fall short of where Linux is right now and how it's going to move forward.

My weekend was a nice balance of relaxation and thinking--provided by a good book (The Unincorporated Man), a trip to the beach, and a very thought-provoking question from a Linux.com reader.

You might think that stories of booting any Linux distro in under a second would be good news, but it seems that some still insist that Linux sucks when compared to Windows.

Let me admit that I’m not an Ubuntu fan. This is not because that it’s getting all the limelight in the Linux world and I am a Fedora user. I don’t use it much becuase it’s too user-friendly. Yes, it’s so user-friendly that I’m not getting the fun of using Linux. No doubt after a brief stint with RedHat9 in my teens, it’s Ubuntu 6.04 which made me Linux lover again.

So recently I have written a lot about how user-friendly Linux has become. Naturally the nay-sayers have spoken loudly and insisted that Linux is far, far behind Windows in the user-friendliness category. So, I decided I wanted to figure out a way to test this argument to see which operating system was, in fact, more user friendly.

As demonstracted by this LinuxToday Blog post and my own experience, if you spend time reading Linux news, you are bound to discover a world of people who will do anything possible to say "Linux sucks."