I think I can sum it up in a few points: 1) It's free 2) It's stable and reliable (mostly) 3) It's less susceptible to viruses and other malware. 4) It comes with a lot of useful software, and is easy to keep it all up-to-date with the latest fixes and improvements.

Freedom to innovate without having to work for Bill Gates.

Linux operating systems are simple, lightweight and fast. They are secure and easily customised. Linux is free. Most Linux OS detect hardware and install device drivers automatically. Software for Linux is free too.

1) Cost - It's free! 2) Lack of license restrictions - It's *really* FREE!! Microsoft and Apple prohibit reverse-engineering. Apple goes a step further and tells you that you are not allowed to run OS X on a non-Apple computer. Why not? You paid for OS X, so why can't you? Because it's not FREE! 3) Stability - The reason OS X is more stable than Windows is that, like Linux, OS X is based on UNIX. 4) Near-immunity to malware - The reason Macs claim (falsely) to be impossible to infect is that, like Linux, OS X is based on UNIX. However, I beleive that to date tehre has only ever been one Linux virus that survived long enough to make it "into the wild". One. Besides, most malware is written for either Windows or Internet Explorer. 5) Security - Being UNIX-based, Linux is designed from the ground up to work on servers and other systems where you don't want just anyone who logs in to be able to have free reign over the system. Some versions of Linux go a step further and are actually secure enough for the DoD and the NSA. 6) Performance - Linux is lean and mean. While certain windows managers like KDE and GNOME may be a little bloated, you can run Linux on nearly and computer that can still boot. Sure, it's a little slow on a 386SX with 1MB of RAM, and you are stuck with a command-line interface (no icons; just typing) but it *can* be done. Damn Small Linux (DSL) only takes up 50MB on a USB key and can run with a graphical interface on a 486DX with only 16MB RAM. Not bad for an operating system that includes a web browser, an MP3 player, a spreadsheet program, and all sorts of other stuff. By comparison, you really can't run Windows XP on anything twice that fast and you can't run it well with less than 1GB of RAM. As for the space requirements, my Windows install alone takes up 3GB and the smallest working WinXP install I ever saw was still more than ten times the size of DSL. Now, if Linux can run faster on a 10-year-old PC than WinXP can on a machine that is ten times faster, imagine how fast Linux can work on a modern PC! Of the top supercomputers in the world, over half of them run Linux, and there is a reason for that. 7) OS Support - Whenever a problem is found in Linux, chances are that at least 842,740 people have found it before you did, and at least 9,841 of them are working on a fix for it, and odds are that at least a few dozen have already fixed the problem and uploaded to code. The fact that *anybody* can write fixes (thanks to #2 above), that means that Linux effectively has a programming department a few orders of magnitude larger than Microsoft or Apple. And unlike those that program for profit, they don't stop working just because the product has shipped. Hell, most commercial software is programmed by people who want to earn their paycheck while most Linux stuff is written by people who want good, clean, error-free code. That is also part of why Linux is virtually malware free. By the time a virus gets noticed, chances are that at least 82 people found a way to kill it before it spread and patch the hole that the virus exploited. That is why Linux viruses are practically unheard of. Imagine trying to sneak across a well-lit football field full of PCP-addicts with assault rifles and you'll get an idea of how both viruses and software faults are dealt with. 8) User support - If you have a problem that is not a legitimate fault in Linux, you can just do a quick search and find *many* ways to fix it. And in the unlikely event that it *is* a fault in Linux, many people will direct you to the patch... unless Linux automatically downloaded/installed it already. Even the most arcane and obscure problem will probably get at least 50 useful responses within a day.