I am a proponent of tackling tasks which represent the maximum reward for the minimum effort. Why spend months focusing on 11 different things when 2 of them could substantially improve your product or your business proposition or your team’s effectiveness.

A couple of recent releases which have just caught the attention of slashdot.org (and now me) in linux land have struck me as being not necessarily effortless developments but in the face of their potential impact on Linux adoption, releases that deserve applause.

First up (and currently slashdotted it seems) is a windows installer for Debian. The other is also a windows installer for the ubuntu linux distro.

What does this mean? It means that two key reasons you delayed installing linux on your laptop or desktop just evaporated.

1. Partitions aren’t used apparently so risk of data loss for files already on your machine is greatly reduced.
2. The time spent learning how to install a distro, configure it to your liking and get it to a productive state dramatically decreases.

Live cds were the first step in wider adoption however my experience of them was mixed. A live cd have saved us on a number of occasions when working with sick machines. For use as a trial OS however I have found them to be slow. This may have been due to an old dvd drive more than anything else.

I’ve run a few installs of debian and redhat for development machines at home but found the time administrating them became prohibitively expensive as I reduced the amount of time I spent developing (as I increased general administration and project management responsibilities). Linux desktops have been progressing impressively and I find that my frustrations with ineffeciencies on my windows machine demand I try something else.

I applaud those who have championed, evangelised, developed, tested these two projects. You may have just created an upward-shift in the Linux adoption. It is time now for the various window managers and applications on Linux to prove themselves with their new-found audiences. I do agree with recent posts that disparity between linux applications user experience is a challenge which continues to affect uptake however could unifying tools which change the way people use their OS minimise the impact of such disunity?

I will be trialling Enso over the next 30 days so more on this to come…

Update: I came across a similar project that has been around longer. I am surprised it has not caught my attention earlier? Maybe evangelism is truly what is needed?