The other night at the family Passover Seder, my sister innocently asked “So, have you heard of this Linux thing?” She said a friend was telling her about it, and when I acknowledged that I had indeed heard of it, she said, “So what’s up with that, is it really something anyone can use?”

It caught me completely off guard because I don’t usually hang out with people who ask that type question, and the complete sincerety and naívete of her phrasing made me burst out laughing.

Then my dad chimed in to ask if Linux had originally come from UNIX, to which my sister questioned, “aren’t those the guys who’ve had their testicles removed?”

The real shame here is that I’ve been a big geek for most of my life. I’ve mucked around in Linux since before GNOME was available. Are there still shortcomings? Of course, and they’ve been hashed out at length all over the place. And a lot of the major issues against “consumer adoption” can also be considered big advantages. All the different distributions cause confusion, the command line is still required, there’s no support for games and adobe blah blah blah…

Truth is, Linux is a viable option for a lot of people nowadays. We – those of us familiar with open source operating systems – know this. My sister hates the Vista installation that came preinstalled on her laptop. She’s told me this. There’s absolutely no reason she couldn’t switch to Ubuntu/Fedora/Take your pick today, other than needing a little helping hand from someone familiar with this strange new territory. But SHE had to ask ME about that Linux thing, and I responded with caution, skepticism, and laughter.

So it’s our fault. The nerds and the geeks out there who debate endlessly with themselves over whether Linux is ready for adoption. This article got a lot of press recently, and I have a lot of respect for the man behind the HeliOS project, and everyone who makes an effort to share their knowledge. For the rest of us, let’s stop thinking of our friends and relatives as incapable of being interested in an alternative operating system. With Live CDs and virtualization there’s really no excuse anymore. I know I’m guilty of it, and I’m going to start making a bigger effort. I’m not looking to convert people, I just want to give them options, which is really what this family of OSes has always been about.

And for those of you who have made the effort to share and inform, how has it gone? I’d love to hear about successes as well as failures, and maybe get some ideas on pitfalls to avoid when approaching this subject with non-geeks. I personally have a bad habit of getting too detailed when it comes to talking about techy things I’m interested in, which is an immediate turn-off to most people.