News came out on Friday that Canonical have started hiring people to help create a user experience that rivals Apple's Mac OS X.

Over the past few years, I've seen Linux evolving from the state it once was, for the hardcore enthusiast only, to becoming ever more usable. I haven't had the opportunity to use Ubuntu 8, but Ubuntu 7 was a real triumph in taking a solid OS and making it more user friendly.

Follow up:

The problem was though, that once you wanted to do something beyond the basics, it was a case of going back to the command line. A prospect that doesn't worry me, but could easily scare off many computer users.

With Canonical making this move to ensure that everything is better integrated and more user friendly (and looking really good too) it should start to appeal to many more users as an alternative to running Windows. However, regardless of efforts in these areas, there is still one big downfall to the Linux OS, and that is the lack of proprietary software. Many software makers still don't offer their products on Linux, such as Photoshop or Microsoft Office to name but two of the most popular.

Canonical have made a very sound move, and this sounds like a solid foundation for the next step in the evolution of Ubuntu, but perhaps the biggest hurdle is getting software makers to sell their software for Linux. As good as many of the open source alternatives are, people will always ask if they can run Photoshop etc on it. Let's hope this is something that is coming soon!