There are few examples that show this best than the sheer number of personalized websites, forums, and blogs that litter the online landscape. Every day, more and more people are building their own websites and leading their own communities. Soon, owning a website will be akin to owning a car or a house.

If you’re looking to start a website of your very own but don’t have much technological knowledge or experience, your best bet would be to get familiar with content management systems, or CMS’s. They are built to take care of all the backend programming and database maintenance, allowing you to focus on creating the website that you want.

Here are some of the most well-known free and open source content management systems that will help you get started.

WordPress

It’s impossible to talk about CMSs without mentioning WordPress. Even though WordPress started off as nothing more than a simple blog publishing product back in 2003, it has since evolved into something much more.

With such a large and passionate modding community behind it, WordPress has become one of the best CMSs on the market. By playing around with various plugins and widgets, you can transform an unremarkable WordPress blog into a beautiful, fully-functional website. In fact, if you weren’t aware, MakeUseOf runs on WordPress, and we have lots of WordPress tutorials for you to take advantage of.

WordPress is powered by PHP and MySQL.

Joomla

Joomla first came on the scene back in 2005 as a derivative of its predecessor, Mambo. Since then, Joomla has been downloaded over 23 million times and remains as one of the most popular CMSs in the world. Take a glance at any list of CMSs and you’ll always find Joomla in one of the top 3 spots.

The great thing about Joomla is that your website can be as lightweight or as heavyweight as you need it to be. There are hundreds of extensions available that will help you mold your website into doing exactly what you wish.

Joomla is powered by PHP and MySQL.

Drupal

In the world of CMSs, Drupal is one of the oldest contenders still around. It was initially released back in 2001, making it older than both of its biggest competitors, WordPress and Joomla. It wasn’t until 2007 that this CMS started booming in popularity.

Drupal is somewhat unique in that its continued survival is due in part to the huge community of volunteer contributors. The developers have embraced the open source aspect of Drupal, thus splitting the CMS into 2 main portions: the core, which is maintained by the developers, and the modules, which are maintained by community contributors. At this time, there are over 9,000 of these modules available for download.

Drupal is powered by PHP and any of the following databases: MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Microsoft SQL Server, MongoDB, or MariaDB.

CMS Made Simple

CMS Made Simple has a pretty clever name. Its initials are CMS, which makes it recursive. For those of you that are tech-geeks, I know that you just smirked on the inside.

In the world of CMSs, CMS Made Simple is a late comer, having been introduced in 2009. However, despite its youth, this CMS has received millions of downloads already and has quickly burgeoned into popularity – and for good reason.

Unlike other CMSs, which encourage their users to fiddle around with code and programming, CMS Made Simple aims to provide its users with an easy road towards developing and customizing a website without having to deal with a lot of the technical mumbo-jumbo behind the scenes. If you don’t intend to hack around with the underlying code that powers your website, CMS Made Simple was made just for you.

CMS Made Simple is powered by PHP and MySQL or PostgreSQL.

b2evolution

Interestingly enough, b2evolution has the same roots as WordPress. In 2003, both CMSs branched off of a preceding blog system called b2/cafelog, of which WordPress became the official successor. While b2evolution isn’t as widely known or respected as WordPress, it does have its fair share of features that prove useful and worthwhile.

b2evolution is perhaps best known for its inherent support for multiple blogs, admins, and users under a single installation. Most other Content Management Systems would require some sort of extension or plugin to support these features – particularly the multi-blog feature. b2evolution handles it all straight out of the box.

And even though b2evolution has a unique feature set right from the get-go, the system can be extended by installing third-party plugins and skins.

b2evolution is powered by PHP and MySQL.

Have you ever used any of these open source CMSs? Tell us about your experiences with them.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

There are other options when it comes to recording your screen, however. Camstudio is a simple open-source screen recorder that’s great for someone who’s starting out his or her YouTube show on software tips and how-to’s. If you’re looking for something that allows you to enhance your videos even more, check out what ActivePresenter offers. ActivePresenter is a screencasting software that you can use to author training tutorials and software walkthroughs. Let’s see what other features ActivePresenter has for us.

Features

ActivePresenter comes in three different versions: Free, Standard and Professional. You can read the feature comparison here, but basically, the Standard and Professional versions allow a bit more interactivity with the final video product and can export to a few more formats than the Free version (e.g. Flash, HTML, AJAX, PDF). The latter has the same capture, editing and audiovisual features that are offered by the Standard and Professional versions. In this article, we’ll be testing the Free version.

Once you download the latest release of ActivePresenter, you can create a new project or capture and start recording your whole desktop, a specific application window or simply in any of the preset sizes, which include HD resolution (1280 x 720) and full HD (1920 x 1080).

After you are done with the recording, you’ll be taken to the editing window, where you’ll see a timeline on the bottom to visualize all the items on your screencast. If you’ve ever worked with Windows Live Movie Maker or iMovie, you’ll know that on the timeline, you can shrink the duration of certain items, move things around, and customize your demo even further.

Basically, this where you can make a montage with all the elements you envision in your tutorial. You’ll be able to insert all types of elements to enhance your screencast, including annotations, callouts, voice-overs, mouse-clicks, etc.

Not only can you add other videos PiP style, you can also edit your screenshots with the built-in image editor, which you can use to crop the image, add text and lines to highlight a specific section, and more.

Once you’ve got all the frames in the desired order, have added all the necessary annotations and overlays, and have the most satisfying screencast with synced audio and no hiccups, you can export your work in several formats.

If you’re on a quest to produce your very own incredible tutorials, you should definitely give ActivePresenter a try. Its interface may look intimidating, but it’s actually pretty painless to create great presentations.

For other ways to build tutorials or even product demos, definitely check out Wink too. It involves a bit more manual work as you’re in charge of every video frame, but it can produce some great video walkthroughs.

What’s your favorite screencasting software? Let us know in the comments section below!

There are a lot of things you can do to protect yourself. You can educate yourself on new potential threats, read on how to keep your computer secure, and what security software doesn’t protect, and obtain the best tools for the job, whether they are anti-virus programs or extensions.

Here, I’ll be taking a look at ClamWin, an open-source anti-virus program that’s been around for a while. Should you get it? Read on to find out.

Getting ClamWin

ClamWin is an anti-virus program based on the only open-source anti-virus solution in the market, Clam AV, which is a toolkit initially designed for UNIX.

As you can probably tell by the name, ClamWin is available as a download for Windows machines only. You can download the installer here, which is almost 40MB, or you can also try the portable app for anti-virus protection on the go.

If you’re wondering about which version to go with, I’m using the portable version 0.97.3 for this review. This latest release has improved bytecode signature matching, in addition to the reigning features that characterize this anti-virus – virus scanner, scanning scheduler, automatic virus database updates, and integration with Windows Explorer and Microsoft Outlook.

If you’re using the installer, be aware that the Ask toolbar might be offered during the installation. Make sure you read what the checkboxes are offering before you click Next. I didn’t see any such thing during the portable application “installation”.

Launching ClamWin

When you first launch ClamWin, you’ll likely need to download the built-in database of viruses.

Doing so will just take a few seconds if you’re connected to the Internet.

Once ClamWin has finished updating its Database, you can see the main window where you’ll have the options to set your preferences, update your virus definition database once again, scan programs currently running in memory and finally, scan specific files or directories.

Running Memory Scan

Selecting this option allows you to scan the programs that are currently running in memory. If you’re as paranoid as this author, t’s probably a good idea to update your virus definition database before running your scans.

Unless you’re running Photoshop, Mozilla Firefox, and many other resource hogs, this scan should be completed in a couple of minutes. Mine took just over 3 minutes and scanned 28 processes in memory.

Running File Or Directory Scan

In the main window, there will be a directory browser where you can select a whole drive (e.g. your C drive), specific folder or even a file to scan.

Depending on what you chose, this scan can obviously last a while. When I was running a scan for my D drive, ClamWin was also working really hard, using almost 109 MB of RAM. Not that it’s a bad sign, but it’s probably a good idea not to multi-task on your PC while you let a scan run through an entire disk drive. After a scan is finished, you can see the report right after, save it or access it in the main window menu.

If a virus is detected during the scan, there are three options you can choose from in the Preferences: Quarantine it, report it, or remove it.

If you’re particular about your scans, you can also filter files to be included or excluded from the scan in the Preferences. You can also limit a file size to scan or not, and also whether to extract files from zipped files in the Preferences window.

If you installed ClamWin instead of using the portable version, you’ll be able to schedule scans right in the Preferences window, increasing security for your PC.

If you’re using the portable version and wish to schedule scans, you could always use Windows Task Schedulerand clamscan.exe which should be under ClamWinPortable/App/clamwin/bin.

ClamWin shines for being an open-source anti-virus program with file and directory scanners, scanner scheduler, automatic downloads of virus databases and more. It does lack a real-time scanner, which could be a big con, but for basic protection and its price, it’s a great product to have on your PC security arsenal.

Have you used Clam AV or ClamWin? Share your experience in the comments section below!

About ClamTk

ClamTk is available for most of the popular distributions such as Ubuntu and Fedora, but is installable on all systems via compilation of the source code. In Ubuntu, you can install it by searching for “Clam” and installing the “Virus Scanner” or by running this in the terminal:

sudo apt-get install clamtk

In Fedora, you should be able to install it by searching for “clamtk” in the package manager or running in the terminal:

sudo yum install clamtk

Interface

Once it has been installed, go ahead and open it from your dash/menu/etc. You will now see the (very simple) main window of the application. There are a couple of different buttons to scan your home folder, a directory, or a file, or to exit the application. Below those buttons are a few checks made by the program to see if the latest version of the ClamAV engine, the latest GUI version, and the latest virus definitions are installed.

The virus definitions should be updated automatically through the scheduler (more on that later), while the engine version and GUI version are dependent on what is pushed to your distribution’s repositories. If any of the two are majorly out-of-date, you should notify the repository maintainers using the recommended method. Most distributions ask that you file a bug complaint or simply wait.

Menu Options

Aside from the very simplistic interface, some more advanced features are hidden within the menus. Under Scan, you’ll find a few more options for scanning, including quick and recursive scans. Under View, you can see the history of actions taken with the program, as well as clear that log. Under Quarantine, you can check the status of your quarantined items, restore or delete individual quarantined items, or simply empty the whole quarantine.

Under Advanced, you can schedule scans, run the antivirus wizard, submit a file for analysis, or tweak other preferences. The scheduler is an important feature as it makes staying virus-free easy and doesn’t require you to remember to run the scanner. It also makes up for the lack of real-time protection. With the scheduler, you can schedule scans of your home folder or entire computer, as well as virus definition updates.

The preferences include multiple scanning preferences, startup options, an option to whitelist directories so that they won’t be scanned, and proxy options so that you can get your virus definitions without any issues.

Finally, under Help, you can manually check for updates for the antivirus engine and the GUI, as well as look up information about the GUI itself.

Conclusion

ClamTk is an easy-to-use GUI for the ClamAV engine that should help you keep your Linux system virus free. However, more importantly, this easy tool will help you get rid of nasty viruses that may be on a separate hard drive or removable media. Don’t forget that as a rescue solution, you can boot up a Linux environment using a LiveCD and install ClamTk to combat the virus that may be plaguing your Windows machine.

What do you think of ClamTk? Is there any antivirus solution on Linux that is better? Let us know in the comments!

What distinguishes the application presented in this article, Neembuu Uploader, is that it’s open-source and it also allows you to define your account login details so you can upload files to your own account. If you’re intrigued by the sound of that, read on and find out how Neembuu Uploader works.

Installation

You can download the application from the main website, which looks very polished by the way, or you can head to this URL which is the directory for all the zipped files. In case you’re wondering which zip file to grab, in this article I’m reviewing version 2.6 of Neembuu. For either of the versions, you’ll need to make sure you’ve got at least version 1.6 or newer since Neembuu Uploader is a Java application (think of it as a sibling to jDownloader, but with the exact opposite feature set). You can always go and get the latest Java over at Java.com.

Use

Once you’ve downloaded the zip file, double-click on the .rar file to run the program. You’ll get a window to type in all your login information for any of the 30 major file-hosting sites.

If you don’t quite need to upload files to a specific account, you can skip this part and close the window. On the next window, you can drag and drop files or use the browser to select your files. At this point, you can also select your hosts again, a setting which will be remembered for your future uploads.

Once your hosts and files to upload are selected, you can add them to the queue, reorder them and click on Start Queue to begin the upload process.

At any point, if you feel like you need to stop uploading, you can click on Stop Further.

Once the upload process has ceased, right-click options will be enabled so you can copy the download link or delete URLs, if your selected file host supports that option.

After you’ve used the program a few times, if you ever need the download URLs for a file you uploaded previously, you can click on Upload History to see a list of uploaded files and their respective links. You can also export that list to an HTML file with the links for easy backup and/or sharing.

Summary

Here’s a few of Neembuu Uploader’s features that make it stand out:

• Open-source and free: If you’re worried that your account information will be leaked somehow, you can look at the source code and even help modify it.
• Cross-platform: Neembuu Uploader will run wherever Java runs.
• Supports more than 30 file hosts: Dropbox, Mediafire, MegaUpload, ZippyShare, MultiUpload (which itself supports uploading to around 10 file hosts), and more.
• Translated to Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Dutch, French, German, Spanish, Vietnamese, and more.
• You can drag and drop files to add them to a queue and start uploading.
• Can set upload limits in case you have a slower connection or are multi-tasking. By default, the maximum number of uploads is 2.
• You can view your upload history and export download URLs to an HTML file for further backup and/or easy sharing.
• You can save queued files so you can upload them next time you open Neembuu.

Overall, Neembuu Uploader makes uploading to file hosts so easy you’ll wonder why you ever uploaded files on separate websites manually.

How do you upload to file hosts? Let us know in the comments section below!

For starters, open source software is usually a good start, as anyone can see exactly how the program is written, and can therefore tell you how well it should work. The most popular open source antiviral tool, Clam AntiVirus (or ClamAV for short), is decent enough to be used on a regular basis.

About ClamAV

ClamAV used to be a pretty simple tool that did nothing more than scan files for viruses from the latest available definitions. Today however, the Windows version has been expanded. A new tool powered by ClamAV is recommended on their site for use on Windows machines. This new tool uses ClamAV and also adds real time protection and a new interface.

Linux users can still get regular ClamAV from their respective repositories, which is fine because you don’t really need anything more advanced on Linux as you do on Windows.

Download and Installation

To download and install Clam Antivirus for Windows, you’ll need to download the tool (known on the site as Immunet, as the Windows client seems to be a joint project) and install it as any other program. During the installation it’ll ask you whether you want the regular version or a trial of the paid version (which I find a little strange for a product based on open source software). However, keep going with the installation, and in no time at all you’ll be presented with the main window of the product.

The Interface

The main window, although slightly cluttered with some ads for the paid version, has a pretty clean design so that it’s easy to keep an overview of everything going on. You get some community links on the left, scanning options and other related information in the center, and a link to the settings and one to update the program on the right.

Scanning

Scanning is pretty straight forward. You can tell it to scan archived or packed files in the settings, and from there you run a Flash Scan (scans running processes), a custom scan, or a full scan. The mentioned rootkit scan is only available, again, in the paid product. Note that virus definitions are in the cloud and don’t have to be locally updated.

Settings

The settings are also quite interesting to go through, as it mentions multiple different engines that the program can use to scan files for viruses. This is especially useful if you’re not very trusting of cloud services and would rather disable those while keeping the local ClamAV engine enabled. There are also some settings where new programs are deemed safe or not before they are even installed or run.

Conclusion

ClamAV/Immunet is a great way to keep your computer safe from viruses. Not only that, but the site heavily advertises that it works well with most major antivirus solutions, so you can always run Immunet in addition to whatever software you currently have to protect yourself. In the end, you’ll be safe rather than sorry.

Since this is a fairly different program that uses the Clam Antivirus engine, in the future I’ll be writing another article of it’s Linux counterpart, which appears in its true form. Stay tuned for that.

What’s your opinion of ClamAV? Do you think it’s a handy tool or just another project that will never have a major impact in the antivirus community? Let us know in the comments!

When network gaming came out and became wildly popular along with the Internet itself, the late night gaming episodes increased in frequency.

However, as I’ve gotten older and the kids and job have become more demanding and time consuming, those late-night episodes eventually faded away into a distant memory.

But I must admit, there are times when I discover yet another game – another highly addictive, networked game – when I am brought back to my heyday college years of binge-gaming and lots of caffeine. Recently, I stumbled across just such a tank war game called BZFlag, and I had to share.

A Strategic Tank Battle

I first caught wind of BZFlag in Tim’s article on open source games. Tim didn’t actually write about it, but one of the readers briefly mentioned, and I quote, “bzflag rules!!!”

Once I downloaded and installed BZFlag, I realized why the excitement. It is a really cool tank war game.

BZFlag stands for Battle Zone capture the Flag. It’s a 3D tank battle game that’s fast paced and at times pretty intense. There is no single-player game – it’s all about team-match network gaming. Some of the games may be set up as one huge team against a second huge team in a classic capture the flag game. Other games are set up in smaller teams – much more intense.

From what I can tell, there are lots of active game servers almost always available, with plenty of players available.

My favorite part of the game is just how much information is on the screen at once in a pretty cool heads-up display. There are a lot of controls, which take a little bit of time to get used to…it took me a while to realize why all of the other players were flying around whenever I tried to shoot them – you can jump with the Tab key!

The HUD display has the real-time scoreboard in the upper left corner, status updates at the top, team scores at the upper right, a scrolling kill roll at the bottom, and most importantly – the radar at the lower left. The radar is the area of the screen you’re going to want to watch the most often, because it’s where you can aim your shots to ricochet off walls to destroy the enemy tanks. Trust me – it’s a lot harder than it sounds, as you can see from the screenshot below.

That’s the screen you’ll see when you get destroyed – I saw it more often than not. Some of these folks have gotten really good. At first you’ll want to try to get up close and personal and blast tanks away like a first-person shooter. Most of the time the enemy tank will launch itself into the air before you can do anything.

After a while, you’ll see that the real art of this game is carefully planning your shots so that it cuts off the path of the enemy tank when he or she least expects it. Or bouncing your shot off a wall nearby and blasting the tank from behind. Getting the knack of jumping helps too. Here I am soaring over the battlefield after some dude tried to blast me.

Another helpful tactic is shooting through the barrier/shield doors (enemy bullets can’t get through, but yours can), and taking pot shots at the enemy tanks through the slots in the walls, like the one I’m peeking through in the screenshot below.

Most of the strategy of this game takes place in that little radar window at the lower left. In the screenshot below, you can see my tank in the center of the screen against a square wall. If you look closely, you can see where my shots (just little specks on the radar) went through the openings in the walls, bounced off the corner wall, and headed for the red cluster of enemy tanks. The goal is to outsmart them before they outsmart you.

Is BZFlag worthy of being called one of the most popular open source tank war games ever? I’m not sure about that, but I do know that it’s very easy to get addicted to it. I was informed by my wife that I had been playing the game for three hours (it felt like 30 minutes). That’s the sign of a great game.

Give BZFlag a shot (get it?) and let us know what you think. Is it fun, or do you find it boring? What’s you’re take? Give your feedback in the comments section below.

So why the heck are they doing this? Isn’t Google a mile ahead of every other search engine? Well, not exactly.

About Duck Duck Go

Duck Duck Go puts a lot of emphasis on a few goals that Google simply cannot. Duck Duck Go’s primary reasons for existing is to be a free, open source search engine that is privacy aware by not tracking you. This way, websites cannot identify you, and you get true search results that aren’t modified to fit your personality and searching habits.

Additionally, Duck Duck Go presents those search results in a very unique way that I find to be more intuitive than how Google shows results. Pack in some handy extras, and you got yourself a winner.

The Site

When you first reach the site, you’ll see a logo, the search box, and a few helpful links. That’s it. No bar running across the top of the page, nothing. In other words, it feels very clean and uncluttered, even when compared to Google which is relatively uncluttered already.

Search Results

When you go ahead and actually enter in a search term, you’ll be greeted by an even cleaner search results page. Depending on the search term, you’ll see a few things displayed that aren’t shown on Google, such as a definition or general information about whatever you searched from Wikipedia, links labeled as the official site, and more. On the right you can also get a few search ideas where, if you click on one, it’ll add that term to what you were searching for and shows you the new results. Oh, and I must say, I’m pretty happy with the results that come back, unlike other search engines.

Settings

Great, so your privacy is protected and you get back some interesting search results. Plenty of people would be happy with that and call it a day, but the creators behind Duck Duck Go didn’t. If you ever go to the settings page, you’ll see exactly why. There are plenty of result settings, privacy settings, color settings, look and feel settings, and interface settings. Simply put, you can change just about anything you want to, which is quite impressive.

Alternative Pages

Duck Duck Go’s primary page uses JavaScript to run, but the site also offers a version that uses only HTML as well as a “lite” version. The “lite” version is pretty self-explanatory, while the 100% HTML page is most useful to those who decided to disable JavaScript in their browser for whatever reason.

Useful Keywords

Last but not least, there are a few tricks that you can use in your search query to get certain results. Duck Duck Go allows the use of certain keywords and “!bang syntax” to get specific results. For example, if you type in “weather new york city”, you’ll get the current weather conditions and forecast for New York City at the very top of your results page. If you type in “!youtube linux”, Duck Duck Go will automatically redirect you to the YouTube results page for the term Linux. You can also do much more such as calculations, search for time-sensitive items, and more. You can find a full list of possible keywords here.

Conclusion

Duck Duck Go is the result of a great idea that seems to be getting some momentum. I do hope that this project can become a player in the search engine market and give us a little freedom from Google. However, Duck Duck Go is well developed as it is right now, and I’ll surely be using it in the near future.

What do you think about Duck Duck Go? Which search engine do you prefer now (or still prefer)? Let us know in the comments!

HP just can’t seem to make up its mind about the company’s mobile operating system, WebOS. It appeared to be on the chopping block just a few months ago, but the company has a new CEO with a new plan – go open source with WebOS.

The announcement, made by the official developer blog, does not include a release date for the operating system’s source code, instead simply stating that “Meg Whitman has reiterated HP’s commitment to WebOS as a cloud-connected, scalable platform, while opening up new possibilities for platform expansion and improvement. She has also committed HP to a course of continued improvement to webOS, which means we’re in it for the long haul. “

There is much speculation about whether HP truly wants to give WebOS a new life, or if the decision to go open source is merely a way to elegantly remove it from the consumer market. Whatever the case, this announcement at least offers some consolation to HP TouchPad owners, who may now see new development of the device’s native OS.

WebOS might also replace Android as the darling of the open source community if HP stays true to its promise to release not only the entire operating system but also its app framework. While Android is offered under the open source license, Google exercises control over its official direction. HP has promised to follow a more collaborative path that won’t be under HP’s full control.

Perhaps we’re not far away from clever developers replacing their Android installation with WebOS, if only to out-geek their friends.

Source: Mashable, Ars Technica

So what’s the problem? Why, in the year 2011 is Linux still not ready for the desktop? It works – sure, but after a long time using Linux as a primary operating system I’m just about ready to buy a Macbook Pro and dual boot Windows. Read on to find out why I’m a sad penguin.

Ubuntu

Enough, I’ve heard it all. “You might as well be using Windows XP if you’re going to use Ubuntu LOLZ!” – but this never used to be the case. I’ve toyed with Ubuntu now for years, and honestly can’t remember the first release I encountered. My decision to install Ubuntu came with version 10.04, after trying out a live USB release and finally getting fed up of Windows.

I know that Ubuntu does not represent Linux as a whole, so why am I doting on it? Because it goes by the slogan “Linux for Human Beings” and is often referred to as the OS of choice for switchers. It’s never been the most attractive, streamlined or powerful of the many thousands of distributions out there, but for a bit of web, publishing and a brief foray into the world of Linux it generally worked, with great stability and few issues.

In my experience much has changed. Ubuntu 11.04 introduced a new interface – Unity – and I can’t stand it. Sure, I could turn it off but most people won’t – do you have to turn off the default Windows or OS X interface for it to become usable? The two machines running Ubuntu in my household felt noticeably slower after the update, partly due to sluggish animations which lagged on both installations.

Add to that the plethora of driver issues that appeared overnight with 11.04 – reduced wireless performance, graphical errors and the most annoying persistent sound sync problem and I’m done. Way to break a perfectly operable operating system. Which leads me on to…

The Many Distributions

I’m not arguing with the server side of things. If you want a solid, reliable server and you’re comfortable with command line access then do yourself a favour and build a Linux box. However – for the newcomer, the dabbler and the experienced-with-Windows user there’s simply too much to choose from.

Some people complained when Microsoft announced multiple versions of Vista and 7, stating it would “confuse the consumer” – but we all know that’s rubbish as the manufacturer generally sells Home Premium or Professional for a not-so-painful OEM price, and if you really need Ultimate then you can always upgrade. The many possibilities that exist for those looking to install Linux can be off-putting and confusing.

Of course once you’ve listened to 101 suggestions, ruled out the ones you don’t like and finally installed your distribution of choice you’ve then got the small issue of…

Software

Free open source software isn’t a bad thing, but sometimes it’s worth paying for a quality product. Take GIMP for example, which after experiencing it, you’re either going to love or hate. If you hate GIMP, be it the workflow, interface or just general shortcomings in comparison with Photoshop then you’ve not got much in the way of alternatives.

GIMP is about as good as it gets on Linux when it comes to imaging software, and even compared to the Windows-only solution Paint.NET it can feel outdated, messy and not particularly intuitive to the Adobe generation. There’s no Adobe line-up for Linux despite the community’s many pleas (Flash support is pretty horrendous at times too).

If you’re a musician used to Traktor, Cubase, Reason, FLStudio (I could go on) or even Garage Band then you’re out of luck there too. There are a few decent solutions, but there’s a reason most music is produced on a Mac or Windows machine.

Serious video editing is a no-go too. Despite the many capable solutions out there that are built for Linux, there’s still nothing that compares to industry standards like Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premier. Of course these are expensive software suites I’m mentioning, but they’re also widely used and bought for a reason. Linux simply can’t compare when it comes to this level of professional software, and it also can’t compare when it comes to…

Gaming

Things have got better when it comes to gaming on Linux over the last few years, but “better” should not necessarily be confused with “good”.  Valve’s distribution service Steam has had a major impact on PC gaming, playing a pivotal role in delivering everything from small indie games to full price new ones. The bad news is that it’s probably never heading to Linux (and even if it did, most games would probably not see the journey through).

There are lots of free games on Linux, but if you’re into your hardware-testing first person shooters or any of the latest releases then you’re going to need Windows. Aside from the odd free-to-play title, very little in the way of recent releases make it to Linux.

Dual-booting is always an option, but if you’re into your games in a big way you probably won’t be bothered with that.

Conclusion

Linux is not a write-off, but as a primary operating system it’s got some serious problems. Not all of these can necessarily be fixed either, though that’s not to say the humble penguin doesn’t have a place where it can be useful.

If you’re lucky enough to find a distribution you love, don’t play games and couldn’t care less about Adobe’s Creative Suite or a powerful video editor then that’s awesome. And those old PCs or netbooks without a lot of grunt might just get a new lease of life with Linux. Good luck!

What do you think about Linux? Do you agree? Disagree? Have a say in the comments, below.