"Say I'm a coffee shop owner," she explained. "What this enables is that even if you have just a single machine, you can have multiple people on multiple desktops, all from one machine."

A retail shop, then, could offer guest PC use for customers without having to invest in a second computer.

"When you compare Fedora 17 to another proprietary OS you might buy at a big box store, the feature parity is there," Bergeron concluded. "This is a good time to come back and take another look at free and open source software."