For any person fed up with Windows may discover that Linux is a desktop alternative that can even run Windows apps natively.  As a matter of fact Linux has become much more user friendly and a lot of the formerly snobbish Linux forums on the web now cater to the newbie as well as the Linux veteran.  An aspiring noob may do research, choose a major distribution such as Ubuntu or Fedora, and even get the OS installed and running.  However, the user will immediately run into a standard Linux problem.  Most commercial media formats are not free and while Windows and MacOs software either pays for the software needed to playback certain video or audio files (called codec software) or uses free alternatives, Linux itself is designed to be free and open source.  This means, in order to legally allow you to use and modify the OS freely, the developers have to disable or not use codecs that aren’t licensed freely. › Continue reading…