A recent post on the Commercial Open Source Software blog points out a little discussed problem that some businesses and even home users may face: not knowing what software to pick. As the post points out, there are so many open-source applications available to do so many different jobs that sometimes choosing the perfect one can be nearly impossible. While there are websites where you can look through the available applications such as SourceForge, these sites are often more aimed more at developers than at users. Instead, I believe this is a problem that can be best solved with software portals.

Software portals, such as Linspire’s CNR (CNR.com), provide a web-based interface to find programs and install them with one click. Software portals are still quite new so there is no truly cross-distro one and they may not have all the applications people want to install or all the information about those applications, but, as software portals grow, they can become more than just a place to install software, they can be a place to find software.

Note: This is the 100th post on the Linux Loop news blog! Hopefully I will post more statistics here later, but for now here are just a few:

• This blog was started (along with the rest of Linux Loop) about 4.5 months ago. That means an average of about .75 posts per day. Not bad at all, but I still want to get that number up to a solid 1.
• In the month of December, the number of posts exactly equals the number of days so far!
• This site has received over 11,000 visits in just the last month!