For years now we have heard about Linux on the desktop and its need to make a concerted effort to illustrate its value to the end user and whatnot. The point of it all being is that if we expect Linux to become a household name, we must find away to get it into the minds of the typical user, like we have seen with Windows.

This past week at the Mozilla headquarters in Mountain View, we talked to user experience design expert Alex Faaborg about the Firefox 3 visual refresh. He shared some insights about the interface design process and talked about some of Mozilla's goals for refining the look and feel of the Firefox user experience.

"My personal view is that it's not the right outcome," he said. "The choice [when installing Windows] would be weird. There's no good UI [user interface] for that.

The only significant feature Linux doesn't already include natively in its many free versions is multi-touch. But will these nifty new Windows 7 features be enough to keep Microsoft's user base happy? Or is it finally time for a change?

I've heard for years how everyone is sick of Windows crashing and how Windows is a poorly made system. At the same time, I've heard about how much better a Macintosh is because it doesn't do any of these things. I've even heard that Linux is better than both of them.

A Windows user who wants to evaluate Linux, or any other alternative operating system, on their current system has a large number of options. In this article, we will look at those options for the busy Windows user who is evaluating Linux, wants to use open source applications, but doesn't want to lose access to their Windows system.

In a recent story, my fellow scribe Preston Gralla wrote, "If Linux has an Achilles heel, from the point of view of a Windows user, it's installing new software." Now, he's seen the error of his ways about that, but he also noted that, "I was rewarded with a long list of recommended updates -- and what they were, or were used for, is anyone's guess. For example, ...

Gnome Shell is the new core user interface for Gnome 3 which provides switching windows and applications but you've probably already heard of it by now so I'll skip the introduction.

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.