What are the best open source apps? If you agree, that the list should start with Firefox, Thunderbird, and Open Office, read on. Are they good enough to convince everybody that FOSS is the way to go?

NO.

Firefox - it FREEZES. It seldom freezes to a process rill, but tabs stop to respond, URL and Search boxes refuse to receive a cursor, things like that. This freezes more often when I go to and from full screen video.

Thunderbird - it has filters OK,...

As we all know, the Linux desktop share is flat since 2004. Yet another example of why it is so follows.

I have the latest Ubuntu in a VM and update it occasionally. Right now it asks for permission to install 115 updates and download 1 MB. OK, granted.

Unfortunately, there are 5 (five) packages that are missing on the mirror it uses. So, it tries to download them, creates a list of 5 "404 - not found" errors, recommends to check the Internet connection(!),...

Linux captured 2% of the desktop and is not moving anywhere despite all the Ubuntu efforts. It took me long time before I could formulate my understanding of the WHY.

Re: 2%. Some say it is 1% and the other say it is biased. Yet the other say it should be estimated at 5% based on indirect data. My impression is that whenever I run over something that looks both measured and unbiased in the Net, it is 2%. So, let it be 2%. The number does not matter much, what matters is that it is...

Browsing the Net, I have run over a heated discussion on the Linux desktop share. Is it less then 1% or close to 10%? Is MS really afraid of Linux or do we misinterpret Balmer's words? And so on.

So, I entered Linux in dice.com and tried to balance it with MS-only technologies. It required C# Silverlight COM IIS MsSQL. I guess this set may be called "all of them". Not bad for Linux, right?

I am a subscriber to the Linux Today newsletter. Apparently Linux Today outsourced mailing the newsletter since the links to Web pages in it look like

http://links.mkt3261.com/ctt?kn=26&m...EyS0&mt=1&rt=0

Sometimes this works, sometimes I get the following in the browser

http://links.mkt3261.com/exchweb/bin...u-1009424.html...