Mxsmanic wrote:
White Spirit writes:

MP3 is not proprietary.

MP3 is a minefield of software patent and copyright issues, both for
players and for recorders of MP3 content.

To be fair, Ubuntu is not always the best choice for beginners given
that it can be quite restrictive and buggy. It's not hard to look on
Google to find simple instructions to get what you need, but there
are better distros for the beginner.

And that's another problem with Linux: an endless number of
"distributions" which are actually different operating systems. With
no standards, there's no hope of competing with Windows.

Quite, I've been hearing for years now how Linux is going to take over,
that it's the best things since sliced bread etc. That's tosh, it has a
tiny market share, is not suitable for the average PC user and will
never be anything other than a minority OS for people who like tinkering
with their PCs. I have nothing against it, on the contrary it would
perhaps be good if it was widespread and got people away from MS
hegemony but let's be realistic, it just won't happen.