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NET RESULTS:A FEW years ago, the open-source operating system Linux was well known to techies, and barely known to the person on the street. That was for good reason - while it had enormous popularity for its reliability and flexibility running servers at the back end of organisations, it wasn't the easiest system to install or use for typical computer users. Most of us are more accustomed to Windows or Macs, where most of the stuff we need comes rolled up seamlessly in the operating system installation, or is easily bought and added on.

Linux, by contrast, required a fairly robust level of understanding how a computer actually works down under the hood. Installing it meant making sense of wiping hard drives clean, creating disk partitions (compartments of space on your computer where you can put something useful like an operating system), and working with more than one partition depending on how you want your PC to function. In other words, it was pretty scary to go there.