An article on Slashdot recently is the latest in a series of items I’ve seen over the past several years, all on the same theme. Each one has identified the thing which will finally allow Linux to build up enough inertia to begin to gain significant market share on the desktop and begin to challenge Microsoft and Apple. Most of the articles focus on a single issue as the key. Sometimes it’s technology―stability and lack of viruses. Sometimes it’s usability―the latest release of Gnome, or Ubuntu’s attempts to make Linux user friendly.

I was at a friend’s office last week. Roger (my friend) has a computer training facility, and training rooms for hire in Perth, Australia (where I live). They have all kinds of courses there all the time, and in the course of conversation I asked if they do much Linux training there, because that would be something I would be interested in doing with my staff.

I still see people arguing about whether GNU/Linux is “ready for the desktop”. The truth is, it really depends…

For me, I switched almost “cold turkey” from Microsoft Windows 3.1 to Debian GNU/Linux 2.1 “Slink” in about 1999 or 2000 (at the time, I liked to say I “upgraded from Win 3.1 to Linux”).