Linux’s biggest enemy.
Linux has certainly a lot to overcome to gain more acceptances into people’s hearts. The community of users is now pretty large and has grown steadily through the years; much effort has been put into making Linux more accessible to non technical people, compatibility is better than ever, new applications keep popping up regularly while more mature ones improve over time. But one thing hasn’t changed, and it is, in my eyes, Linux’s biggest enemy: its users! Arrogance combined with a love of obfuscation make the self-appointed gurus the real enemies of the cause; as they have filled the void left by a lack of social life by learning all the commands and common programs, they have built that ‘superior’ attitude that pushes away some new users and certainly scares away the curious ones.
Is it really that hard?
If you look at Unix in general, the commands, interfaces, etc are notoriously inconsistent and many choices are plain arbitrary; The main difficulty in learning Linux is really being able to memorize things and be able to read the documentation. Alas, this is one of the big issues: the documentation is cryptic at times because it is usually written with many assumption; the first one is that the user is familiar with everything else but what they are reading about, and also it is usually very short on examples; Linux Gurus love when you have to work hard to find an answer. It is somewhat similar to reading a patent document, where everything fits together, but you have yet to figure out what the object really is about. There is no doubt that with time and patience to experiment, it is actually easy to learn; but this implies two things: you have time and you want to learn. I read this somewhere, and I really like this quote: ‘Free software is only free if your time is’.
Outgrowing the current situation.
For reference
This server runs on Linux CentOS, this article is typed on a Windows Vista laptop and the second laptop here runs Ubuntu and my desktop is Windows XP.

