The geeks have been pushing it for years now. The nerds tout their penguins and tell you how much they hate Microsoft(tm). It's been all the rage in tech circles since its appearance on the scene back in 1995, after Linus Torvalds, a student in Finland, introduced a new, open source operating system to the world. It was aptly named 'Linux'. Torvalds had wanted an alternative to expensive and bloated Unix operating systems, but instead what he created was an inexpensive alternative to, well, everything.

    For years now, Linux has been known primarily only to people in technology fields. While average home users may have heard of it, it is still surrounded in a cloud of mystery for the majority of people. When people think alternatives to the Windows operating system, they usually think of Apple's Mac OSX, but is it time to take a look at Linux?

    Huge corporations like Google, Inc. have been using it to power their servers for years now. It has been landsliding into the corporate world because its simply a better solution at a better price. Cheaper and better? Hey, that could apply to home too! While Google uses it to power hundreds of thousands of servers, what makes it a candidate for home use?

    Ease of use. WHAT!?! Ease of use? Yes. I've said it now. It's easy to use. CD based install (or even one that will go over the internet for some versions), graphical user interface, point and click most everything, you name it. Linux has come a long, long way over the last few years.

    What's a GUI? Well, a graphical user interface is what you use to point and click everything. Every time you move your mouse around and click something, it's the equivalent of executing a command in the background. The interface is what drew people to PC computing to begin with. Does Linux have a better interface? That would be a matter of opinion. What it does have is more interfaces. You can choose from KDE, Gnome, WindowMaker (usually for more advanced or long time users) and still have other options like afterstep, enlightenment and a bunch of other handy tools to customize your desktop to do whatever it is you need to do. Most new users would probably be most comfortable transitioning from Windows or OSX to KDE.

    You've probably heard it also has better security features. This, like GUI's, is up for debate. Linux is much more secure out of the box than Windows, primarily for two reasons.

    Compatibility is now better for Linux than it used to be with most peripheral devices such as printers and external hard drives. In fact, with the release of Microsoft's new Vista version of Windows, Linux may actually be better for the sake of compatibility. It's also worth mentioning again, that not only is the operating system more efficient, but things like drivers (the software that makes things like your monitor and printer work) are also made up of smaller code. This gives you the advantage again of less use of resources on your machine (RAM and CPU), which in turn means you don't need to upgrade as often.

    One school in Maine interested in trying Linux piloted a program with one version of the OS which had marvelous results. They saw very little problems switching with students and most staff. The biggest group with difficulty in the transition were the 50 and over demographic, who, not surprisingly have problems with most new technology, thus eliminating the correlation of it being the fault of Linux itself. They also found that by switching, they had to upgrade their hardware only once every 3 years rather than the usual 18 month cycle that schools in general work on.

    Well enough about all this hardware mumbo-jumbo. How will I create my office documents if I can't use MS Office? Simple. You can use (again) a number of alternatives. The most common two are Koffice (made for the KDE environment, but will run on most Linux GUIs) as well as OpenOffice, a product distributed by Sun Microsystems, another powerhouse in the technology world. You can do all of your editing, spreadsheets, etc in either of these office applications and what's even better – they're free. You can download them online, and in most cases they even come with Linux when you install it. Aside from office apps, you'll find Linux has an alternative for just about anything that you've used in Windows. Graphical applications, multimedia, internet browsing and e-mail, the list goes on, and once again, 99% of it is absolutely free. The one thing you won't find is high end games. As much as the tech guys seem to love games and gaming, they seem to have decided to leave that to the console gaming world.

    So 'Open Source' means it's free? No. The term open source means anyone can view the pre-compiled code, make any changes they want to it, call it something else and do pretty much anything with it so long as the credit is left in place in the code for who wrote what. It's a little more complicated than that, and if you really want to know, you can always go to http://www.gnu.org and check out the GPL license. So as not to confuse you, suffice it to say that most open source software is free. This is because many times it's developed by an entire community of people, and not a central company.

    So, to recap -fewer or no viruses, free, open source, cheaper to own, cheaper to run and easy to use. What else were you waiting for? Give it a try!

    If you're wondering what version to try, for beginners a good recommendation is Ubuntu or Kubuntu. These are both distributed for out of the box use on desktops and have tons of support.

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