There have been reports on the Linux newswires recently of dissatisfied Ubuntu users leaving for one reason or another. I’m not going to jump on that bandwagon here, but instead just point out that in any community, especially an immature one, this is bound to happen. My message is to those who are leaving — you should put Debian at the top of your list of distros to try.

Over the last week I have read numerous articles bemoaning the sad state of Linux documentation, and I have to say - I am on board. Linux is an outstanding operating system. There is very little it can not do. The biggest problem (especially for the new user) is getting there.

We've been relatively quiet over the last few weeks, because we've been busy pulling together 60 issues of Linux Format magazine, converting all the reader questions and answers about Linux into web-friendly formats.

For ages people have complained about how there's no drivers for certain products in Linux (or insufficient drivers), despite Linux having the largest driver database in the entire world, easily twice as large as Microsoft's largest collection. However, the problem doesn't lie in what's supported, but rather when it's supported.

Building software from source - that's a bit old-school, isn't it? Who wants to wrestle with the command line, hunting down dependencies and coaxing the GCC compiler into running properly?

This guy describes his experience of leaving a livecd in the drive and his mum reboots and clicks her way through accidentally installing linux on the machine and in the process the hard drive is formatted. IOW: linux is too easy to install.

Ivan Voras (one of current commiters) reading release notes for FreeBSD 1.1 noticed that anymore there are no developers, that was developing FreeBSD from the very beginning. Also, there are still similiar organizational and technical problems that were 15 years ago.

"I had always wanted to try it since its thought of as a Distro for more advanced Linux users. And it couldn't have been more perfect for me."