Rad wrote on Jul 12^th, 2008 at 9:45pm:

I think you mean to ask "Does IE run on Linux?" and the answer is No.  Microsoft owns IE and I've never seen them develop an application that runs natively on Linux.  Not that I blame them.  Many MS apps (like Office) do run with Wine, but I don't think IE is one of them.
Rad wrote on Jul 12^th, 2008 at 9:45pm:

Konqueror, Firefox, and Opera all work natively on Linux.  I use Firefox.  Now that Flash 9 has a Linux version, its been a long time since I visited a site that doesn't work in FF on Linux.  Only issue is occasionally sites with QuickTime video, which seems to fallen out of favor anyway.  There is probably a way to get it working, but I run across it so rarely these days I haven't bothered.

Opera works great on Linux.  Opera has always been a very innovative browser and I don't think it gets enough attention.  Unfortunately, there are some sites that don't work with Opera (even in Windows.)  They are mostly sites with heavy multimedia or banks (which code for specific browsers and Opera doesn't get enough traffic for them to code for it.)

Konqueror used to be popular because it came installed on many distributions.  Most distributions have switched to including FF instead.

Rad wrote on Jul 12^th, 2008 at 9:45pm:

Driver support is less and less of a factor.  Linux is in a far better position today that it was when I started learning it a few years ago, and was far better then than a few years before that.  Most everything works fine - printers, scanners, video cards, etc.  But, I do have a sound card right now that should give me 5.1 surround but is currently only playing stereo.  The drivers are out there, but the installation of the drivers is non-trivial and I haven't made the time to get it working since I installed it a few days ago.  So, driver support is still behind Windows.

With several of the big vendors like Dell and HP now selling Linux desktops, word on the street is that they will start pushing vendors for better Linux drivers.  For example, there are rumors that AMD/ATI is considering releasing their video drivers as open source.  So, it gets better every year and that trend is not slowing.

I think the biggest disadvantage of Linux is still some big-named software doesn't work.  Photoshop and Dreamweaver used to be my examples, but they both work in Wine now, so I don't have good examples for you, but that's usually the deal-breaker.  Professional audio software and niche things like that don't always have a perfect Linux counter-part (although I'm often surprised at the high quality of the Linux alternatives.)  Games is the biggest gotcha.  Most of the newest hit-title games don't work in Linux (although many of them work in Wine within the first year on the market, including WoW.)

The other disadvantage I've found after using Linux for a few years is that not everything is point-and-click.  MOST things are, and distros like Ubuntu make running Linux simpler every day, but I still occasionally run across a program I want to use that has to be installed by compiling from source.  It's usually not difficult, but does involve textual commands on a command line, which is a put-off for many users.  You won't run into this if you are just reading email, chatting with friends, and surfing the internet.  But power-users who do more diverse things with their computer will run into it from time to time.

For me, the biggest advantage of Linux is the freedom.  I love being able to set exactly how the system will run and how it will behave.  It's very hard to describe exactly what I mean because most people think of making code changes to the underlying OS when I say that, and that is not what I mean.  Linux has infinite options, and you can usually find someone who will help you hack it to do something even if the option doesn't exist.  There's no company trying to force you to use Linux in a certain way. 

Linux is also very powerful.  In other OS's (I won't bother to name them,) you have to pay more money for more features.  What's fun about Linux is you can get all the features for free.  You can also take them all out for free.  Linux can be stripped down to run from a 50MB miniature CD, customized for specific purposes, or you can just install everything under the sun and have it all at your fingertips.

Then, there are the standard reasons everyone spouts in Linux's favor: it uses less system resources - making it feel faster on the same hardware, it is more stable, and I still think it's more secure (despite studies of the number of bugs, patches, whatever - I haven't used antivirus for 2 years now and never had a problem and you can't do that on Windows.)

Rad wrote on Jul 12^th, 2008 at 9:45pm:

Google.

"Linux" is very broad, so there isn't a place that is good at everything.  But, there are many places that are good at something and Google is really good at finding them.

Also, there are forums set up for each specific distribution - Red Hat, Ubuntu, etc.  Those are always great places to find information, even if you don't run that specific distribution.  For example, I'm running Arch Linux on my desktop right now, and Google often finds the answer to my question on the Ubuntu forums (even tho they are structured very differently.)

I'll get to the rest of your questions over the next few days.  I need to sleep now, but these are great questions many people might have about Linux.

MrMagoo wrote on Jul 13^th, 2008 at 3:59am:

does ff run at the same v3.0, like on windows? i mean, does mozilla release both win and linux versions concurrently? .. or is there a lag for the linux release?

Rad wrote on Jul 13^th, 2008 at 9:46am:

Yes.  They simply compile multiple versions - Windows, Linux, Mac, etc - of the same source, so they are all released at the same time and have the same features. 

Note that they may not have the exact same plugins and themes.  Most plugins work perfectly in Linux, but a small number (such as the PayPal plugin) do not work in Linux.

Rad wrote on Jul 12^th, 2008 at 9:45pm:

The short answer is no.

Answering this runs into the problem that "Linux" is very big.  Do you mean all Unix flavors (including the BSD's, Linux distros, Solaris, and everything that is Unix like)?  Do you mean just Linux?  Do you mean servers, PDA's, embeded devices, etc?  What you count will skew the numbers significantly.  Linux has always had a large share of the server market.  Linux currently dominates the UMPC market, and is growing quickly in the PDA market.  It also runs on everything from the Space Shuttle to TiVo.

I'm going to assume you want to track the Linux Desktop usage specifically.  Unfortunately, that question isn't easy to answer either. Distrowatch.com tracks the popularity of various distributions.  You can make a rough estimate of trends from their site.  Google Trends can provide some insight, it is hard to draw any conclusions from.  Other than that, I don't know of a web site that has an up-to-date number of Linux desktops or even how such a survey could be accomplished reasonably.

It's too bad, cuz I'm as interested as you are in knowing.