Steve Jobs’s Touch Is What Ubuntu’s Missing: Rich Jaroslovsky

If you’re put off by Steve Jobs’s control-freakdom and Microsoft’s long history of buggy bloatware, you might want to spend some time with Dell Inc.’s line of laptops running Ubuntu, the free, consumer-oriented version of the open-source Linux operating system. Cheaper than Apple, cheaper and more stable than Windows, Ubuntu might be a viable alternative were it just not quite so geeky.

This may be the year when Linux operating systems go mainstream. Most notably, Google Inc. is promising we’ll see netbooks running its Linux-based Chrome OS in 2010. Ubuntu, by contrast, isn’t just a get-me-on-the-Internet-fast solution: It’s a full-fledged Windows substitute designed to be at home on a wide range of hardware.