Homework English :

My personal reasons for choosing or not choosing Linux
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In my opinion, you have to evaluate the pros and cons of installing linux
on a box depending on what you want to do with it and on your personal
preferences and skills.

To me, the key advantage of linux is its license as many of its other
advantages arise from it.
Linux is free software licensed under the GPL [2] which
means you are free [1] to use, copy, distribute, study, and modify the
software. 
Since many people make use of these rights, linux evolves very quickly and
more and more powerful free software that is reviewed constantly by many
programmers becomes available for the GNU/Linux operating system.
Linux also offers a lot of programming tools
and comes with advanced network capibilities and security features
by default. Popular examples for free software include the Apache web server,
the Firefox webbrowser and the GIMP. 

Of course there also is commercial software for linux, but in most cases,
users coming to linux from other operating systems will need to invest
some time to get familiar with programs that differ from the ones they
used before. 
The same goes for the OS itself - you can't expect to learn a new OS
in a few hours and you'll have to spend some time to learn Linux and 
read documentation.

This leads to another point that i like linux for : there's lots of 
documentation available that can help you if you get struck, and 
a very active community exists, so you can ask for help in IRC
channels, on mailing lists and in news groups. 

Another great feature of linux is compatibility - linux interacts with many
other operating systems and runs on a large variety of hardware 
architectures [3] ranging from handheld devices to Alpha Servers and
clusters. 
On the other hand, driver support for cutting edge hardware may not be as
good as on Windows or MacOS as many hardware vendors don't support the
linux community and refuse to publish the documentation needed to
write appropriate drivers.

So if you use your computer mainly for playing the newest games or depend
on software that is not available for linux or hardware that linux lacks
drivers for, using it may not be the first choice.
The latter also applies if you are unwilling to use a console but think about
managing one or more linux boxes, as the console is
the main tool used for linux system administration.

Summed up i would say that linux has advantages and disadvantages when 
compared to Windows, other UNIX variants or any other OS. Whether the
advantages or disadvantages prevail in your situation, you have to decide
on your own. 

To me, linux is the OS of choice in most cases. I have used it on laptops,
desktop computers and servers and prefer it to any other OS due to its 
freedom and good mix of stability, functionality, security and ease of use.

TS 03/2005

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[1] "free as in free speech, not as in free beer" 
    http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

[2] The GNU general public license
    http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html

[3] architectures supported by linx
    http://www.kernel.org/