Unlike the myths that are behind the prevention of Linux adoption, this piece will closely examine the indisputable obstacles and what will have to be done to overcome each of them.

I talk a lot about what I think is wrong with the current state of Desktop Linux. And I spend a fair bit of time talking about what I think can be done to improve it. So I figured, why not lay out, piece-by-piece, what I think would be the ultimate Linux Desktop Distribution.

For years technology fans have been fighting over one of the most foolish mottos ever mentioned by the Linux community: “the year of the Linux desktop.” So rather than continuing the usual arguments any further, I want to instead take an honest look at where today's desktop Linux distributions are from a casual user perspective.

In his Oct. 1 column, Michael Gartenberg claimed that Linux is still far from making it on the desktop. As someone who has tracked Linux’s progress since 1991 and the progress of the IT industry since 1979, I would like to offer an alternative perspective.

Quite a lot of people have given this prospect a thought. Can Linux become a serious player on the desktop market? Can it contest with Windows and MAC - and possibly even overcome them one day? Here's my view.

KDE keeps the desktop relevant and powerful as it doesn’t force an interface designed for phones or tablets on desktop users. KDE offers different GUI environments for different form factores. There is Plasma Desktop for desktop computers,Plasma Netbook for netbooks, and "Plasma Active" for smartphones and tablets. So a desktop or tablet user doesn’t have to make any compromise.

Released just a few days ago, GNOME 3 is the latest major version of the GNOME desktop environment. If you are currently running a GNOME-based Linux or BSD distribution, you are probably using version 2.30 or 2.32, but that should change in the upcoming release cycle when many of the distributions will be shipping with GNOME 3 as the default.

Over the years, the question “is Linux ready for the desktop” has been raised time and time again, and countless articles have been written about the strengths and weaknesses of this operating system. While desktop Linux adoption has yet to go completely mainstream, recent indicators show that a major change is underfoot.

This tutorial shows how you can set up a Linux Mint 12 (Lisa) desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.