Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, has said: “The great task in front of us over the next two years is to lift the experience of the Linux desktop from something that is stable and robust and not so pretty, into something that is art. Can we not only emulate, but can we blow right past Apple?”.

He added: “I see this [need] for free software - beautiful, elegant software. We have to invest in making the desktop beautiful and useful. The iPhone, for instance, is effectively a pure software experience”.

Being a Windows/MacOS user, and a close watcher of the Ubuntu distribution (which will replace Windows sometimes in the future, although I will probably keep on using XP as long as I can, just because I’m lazy), I saw this objective getting closer and closer with every new release of Ubuntu.

Today, MacOS X is the best flavour of Linux in terms of usability. Therefore, any Linux distribution should be able to emulate the “look and feel” of MacOS X with a few tweaks and a better integration with hardware platforms.

This, in my opinion, is the real challenge, as a Linux distribution must be compatible with most personal computers while MacOS X has been developed for a specific hardware. The technology, though, should be capable of solving this problem.

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Just brilliant… MacOS X is actually the best implementation of Linux, followed by Ubuntu. The gap is closing, although Ubuntu will never get where MacOS X is because of the better hardware integration of the latter (although you pay the integration and the ease of use with stability, as the MacBook is definitely the most fragile of my three machines - Ubuntu, Windows XP and MacOS X - being the first one that slows down and then freezes when I open more than 100 tabs with Firefox).

When Microsoft will stop maintaining and supporting Windows XP, I will definitely switch to Ubuntu and MacOS X. With a little bit of research, I have been able to configure the two PCs in the same way, using mostly open source software. Switching between the two machines is just a question of syncing a few directories.

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