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Almost all my friends use Windows or Mac. (not many of them are geek like me.) And when I talk to them about Ubuntu (sometimes) they ask various questions.
Your common, non-technical Windows user has most likely not heard anything more than a cursory mention about Linux. They have questions about Linux that are not always answered easily.
Here at TuxRadar, and in the magazine behind the website, Linux Format, we get a lot of really basic questions from new users. We've taken the most common questions and printed them verbatim below, providing Plain English answers.
I got a phone call yesterday from a recruiter wondering if I would be interested in a Linux administrator position. The first question she asked was did I have any experience with Oracle RAC and I could hear her eyes glaze over as I answered her with a brief description of what I have done with RAC. After shaking herself back to life, she asked if I had any experience with Unbreakable Linux.
Red Hat released Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers on November 3rd. A couple of weeks before the release, I emailed Red Hat media relations contact Kerrin Catallozzi and asked for an interview with some Red Hat employees regarding Red Hat Enteprise Virtualization. It took a several weeks to get the answers back mainly because the official product release happened...
So when a friend who is a drummer for a band called "The Long Gone Daddys" asked me to fix his computer I asked what do you use it for? Answer to check the MySpace and web site for the band mostly. He also needed better tools for the web site management as well. He knew I used Linux so I asked if he wanted to give it a try. He answered that he wanted to have a working computer that stayed working.
I first met Bill Gates at the age of twenty. He stood in the yard of his Washington lakefront home, Diet Coke in hand, a tastefully small ketchup stain on his shirt, which no one had the courage to point out, and answered our questions, in-turn, like a savant.