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Is Linux really ready for a Home User ?

I used Windows OS for the past 10 years. I tried (or tried to try) Linux OS some 9 years back. I tried to install Linux on my very very old computer with 500 MHz processor, 32 MB RAM, 4 GB HardDisk. I was first overwhelmed when the install wizard started showing some tech jargon like cylinders etc… Somehow I read associated help and successfully installed Linux to only find out that my mouse is not detected. I tried to tweak it by asking friends, in those days I did not have internet connection at home, I used browse internet from Internet Cafe’s where it was too expensive. Now I got frustrated and thought of going back to Windows, but wait I never formatted a hard disk and never installed Windows OS also.
I gave it a try, I popped in Windows 98 CD and the installation was smooth. Very similar to how I would install any other program on Windows OS, Few mouse clicks and there it is ready. However my display drivers were not installed, but it did not take long to get the drivers and install them. I never again tried Linux again untill 2008.
I was reading a lot about Linux, Ubuntu etc.. how they are ready for alternate OS and especially how Ubuntu can be installed on Windows partition and can be uninstalled from Windows Add/Remove programs. So I gave it a shot, downloaded Ubuntu CD, installed on my hard disk, rebooted and I had a prompt at boot time to select the OS, I was more than happy to see that Linux has evolved so much and it was so easy to try Linux without going through the hassle of disk partitioning etc… When my system booted up, I was even more happy, everything worked fine, my mouse, keyboard, sound card, video drivers everything worked great.
It was perfect with OpenOffice installed, few games, multimedia apps etc… The package manager where I can search for and install applications as long as those applications are available. Just too wonderful and I really appreciate the guys at Ubuntu for making such a great Linux Distro. This is for the very basic user, but not enough for me. As I started playing around more with Linux I found that it is not really ready for a Windows alternative.
Today I read an article titled Ten Commandments for New Linux Users, and I felt like if these are the really 10 commandments then Is Linux really worth ?

4) Thou shalt read documentation and man pages.
Always read the documentation. The people who wrote the software tried to anticipate your questions, and provided answers before you asked.
C’Mon do I really need to read the documentation to start using an OS ? I think OS should be as User Friendly as possible.

Thou shalt use the available support system.
Switching to Linux can be tough. It can be frustrating, but there are a lot of people out there who want to help you. Let them.
Then is it worth the switch ?

Thou shalt not try to recreate Windows.
Linux is not meant to be a clone of Windows. It’s different. Embrace and appreciate the differences.
True, Linux is not a clone of Windows but aren’t different distro’s of Linux trying to be close to Windows to increase User adaption ? And isn’t the blogosphere filled with comparisions of Linux with Windows. They are different in a lot of ways at the underlying kernel level, but when it comes to End User’s experience isn’t linux trying to be close to Windows, yes I can hear people saying about Vista, I am comparing Windows XP.

Thou shalt not give up.
I tried several distributions before I found one I liked. I still try other distros from time to time. I also tried several different programs to serve one purpose before settling on what I use now (amarok, xmms, beep, exaile for music - azureus, ktorrent, deluge for bittorrents). If you don’t like the defaults, remember that you can change almost everything to suit you.
Iam sorry I really don’t want to try and try and try. I would rather stick to my current OS. BTW, if we need to try and try till we find a distro that suits us, that surely indicates Linux is not ready for Home User yet. I don’t want to end up installing an reinstalling my OS every now and then.

Conclusion:
Linux has come a long way, it has greatly improved, I appreciate the work of Linux community. As of now I don’t think Linux is ready for Home adoption, but it is very very close to get there. I wish the Linux community would achieve as soon as possible.

BTW don’t forget to checkout Ubuntu Desktop Edition, it is really really nice.

Update:
I want to use Linux that is the reason why I tried Linux. I may not be an authority to comment on Linux, this is just my opinion as a first time user trying to use Linux on a Home machine (a user trying to use Linux at home).

Is Linux really ready for a Home User ?

Tried Minefield ?

What is MineField ?
Minefield is a way the future of Firefox, it’s a pre-release/alpha version of the Firefox browser.

It has a new blue icon. I am not making any statements about the speed, because I believe firefox is fast enough for me. Minefield can exist side by side with your current version of firefox so give it a try, but remember it is a pre release.

I installed this 2 days back, currently it does not support my favourite plugins - FireBug, FireFTP, HttpFox.

Everything worked smooth, except for one crash when I visited some web page that had a Java applet. When it restarted that web page worked fine.

Download from here.

If you are interested in helping mozilla by reporting bugs please visit this page.

Tried Minefield ?

nUrlRewriter - IIS7 Url Rewriter

nUrlRewriter is a ASP.NET Http Module written in managed C# code which examines incoming Http requests and applies user defined criteria which may result in a Http request being redirected or rewritten. Web pages within existing web sites are often archived or retired, however many Internet based hyperlinks may exist for such web pages. nUrlRewriter solves this problem by providing a facility which can easily redirect or rewrite such Http requests to other web site web pages or web applications. For example, a discontinued product web page may be redirected to a general product category web page. nUrlRewriter differentiates itself from other redirectors/rewriters in that nUrlRewriter also supports the IIS7 Integrated ASP.NET Pipeline, enabling nUrlRewriter to redirect/rewrite any incoming web application URL supported by the IIS7 web server, such as but not limited to native HTML applications (htm, html), classic ASP applications (asp), PHP applications (php) as well as ASP.NET (aspx) applications.

nUrlRewriter works equally as well with IIS5 and IIS6.

Home Page

I was thinking of reading some source code of open source projects, I thought I will start with this as this is a simple and small little utility and in my imagination, the source code could be under 1000 lines. Do you have any good suggestions or what are your favourite open source projects ?

Comments and Suggestions are Welcome.

nUrlRewriter - IIS7 Url Rewriter

Why didnt I come across JQuery early ?

I was recently very busy with a lot of work and did not have the chance to post on my blog. But during this period I came across a very powerful javascript library called jQuery. Its just fantastic. For the bulk of features it has you may expect a monster javascript library, but it is just 16kb (minified and gzipped). So thats hardly a 2 second overhead for end user. It eases DOM Traversal, Animations, events and AJAX. I came across this library almost 3 weeks back. And everytime I explored more features of this library, I am becoming more interested in this. I would rate this 10/10. What are you waiting for ? Checkout this cool library at jQuery. BTW did I mention it has plugin support and has a huge collection of plugins ? Checkout the plugins at Plugins.

Why didnt I come across JQuery early ?

Microsoft sponsoring Open Source Census

And here Open Source Census has a new sponsorer, Microsoft. But why is Microsoft sponsoring ? A mystery. The Open Source Census is a project started earlier this year that aims to track and catalog the use of open-source software in enterprises worldwide.

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Microsoft sponsoring Open Source Census