Mark Knecht wrote: Users can do a lot of testing, and also tell programmers what they need a program to do, which is valuable input. The problem is finding projects that are actively maintained with developers willing to listen to you -- but it's not as hard as it sounds. If you have problems, send messages to mailing lists and generally people will try to help you out, if it's something they'd normally be responsible for. They will be especially responsive if you make detailed requests for help that they can easily address -- saying, "I can't get X to work with Y, but I haven't tried anything else or looked at the documentation yet" generally isn't descriptive enough. There is a lot you can learn about Linux without actually needing to "program" anything. Admittedly the "point-and-clickiness" of Linux is lacking compared to Windows, and if you really want control I think you need to learn how the shell works. IMHO. It's very common that you will need to take small, individually functional programs, and combine them to produce something original. If you learn how to use the shell and its redirection and piping, you will really start to see what I mean. Check out: http://www.freeos.com/guides/lsst/ for example (the English isn't that great but it's still a useful guide). There's also the whole "RTFM" thing. A lot of what you want to do is probably well-documented already, and people don't want to repeat themselves. It can be very instructive to type "man <command>" or "info <command>" if you are feeling lost ("info bash", "info textutils", "info sh-utils", "info fileutils", and (if your system is up to date) "info coreutils" are particularly useful if you want to learn the shell). You just need the patience to sit down and devour manuals and tutorials, when pointed to them. If you need general advice, or can't find it documented anywhere, ask on mailing lists about how to do what you want, but make it clear that you are willing to learn and to read. Anyway, you're still right: using Linux is a lot more involved than using Windows, and projects can be poorly maintained -- "./configure ; make; make install" doesn't always work perfectly, for one. But usually in those cases there is going to be another program or set of programs that does what you want. Unless we're talking about specific hardware support, in which case you generally are SOL if no current solution exists. Cheers, Chris