An average user may be an over-used expression, but it is still important to keep in mind what it means. For the most part, I agree with this article describing the average user, but I disagree about the average user's technical abilities.

Waiting for a laptop or desktop to boot has to be one of the biggest time wasters for the majority of computer users no matter what the operating system. You would think with faster CPUs that the problem would just go away, but it hasn't. In fact, if anything, it has gotten worse.

As a matter of fact, what IS the right market for Linux? The mythical Average User? No way. The average user wants a computer that performs the tasks set for it. Those people are in the market for a computer, a real, physical machine, a tangible object with a keyboard (real or imaged), a mouse (or trackpad/trackball/touchscreen), and a display screen.

The average consumer might not know much - if anything - about high-end technologies like pNFS, PCIe and 10Gb Ethernet (10GbE), but they could revolutionize the consumer PC market in ways that most consumers can't even begin to imagine.

The first time I saw Linux was in the back of a computer shop while a tech was fixing my computer. An enthusiast had brought his machine in, and was boasting about how much more complete its applications were than anything on Windows.

Either there really is no "average" computer user, or "Mrs. D" is just not your "average" average user.

"I am using both Debian and Wikipedia. And at the time when I discovered them I was fascinated with those projects. General operating system and software distribution is something which we need, as well as the sum of human knowledge is something which we need.And there are some similarities and some differences between them..."

A FEW years ago, the open-source operating system Linux was well known to techies, and barely known to the person on the street. That was for good reason - while it had enormous popularity for its reliability and flexibility running servers at the back end of organisations, it wasn't the easiest system to install or use for typical computer users.

While there's overwhelming similarity between the operating systems in most cases, there are also a lot of differences. As you probe more into the differences, you find that they emerge from deep-seated disagreements.