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.

I recently got a PlayStation 3 from my wonderful girlfriend, and one of the reasons I wanted one was for its great possibilities of being a media center. I installed MediaTomb on my Linux machine (Gentoo) and after half an hour of configurations, it was ready to stream content to the PS3.

Boxee is an open, connected and social media center for Linux and OSX (Windows not supported yet).

This is a simple tool I wrote a few months ago to turn Pidgin, everyone’s favourite multi-client Instant Messenger (works with gtalk, msn, yahoo, aim etc), into a customized answering machine (and more) when you are away from your computer.

Deluge is a full-featured free opensource BitTorrent client for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. It uses libtorrent in it’s backend and PyGTK for it’s user interface. Deluge was created with the intention of being lightweight and unobtrusive. Deluge features a rich plugin collection; in fact, most of Deluge’s functionality is available in the form of plugins.

As we all know, there are a vast amount of applications available for Linux. People outside the Linux scene will probably have heard and used the most famous open source apps (such as Firefox), but there are a select few programs that are either insanely cool and innovative, or just extremely polished.

A conversion calculator can save you a lot of time and unnecessary mouse clicks when you need to convert values in a document from the imperial to the metric system (or vice versa). Although OpenOffice.org doesn't have a built-in calculator, you can easily create your own one using OpenOffice.org Basic.