Linux for Everyone

Linux is quite well known today among the IT community but I find that there are still very few people using it as their desktop system both for home as well as office/school/college use. So here I share some facts with you about Linux that may make you want to try it out.

For Everyone

1. Linux is a very mature Operating System. With its first release in early 90s it has become extremely powerful and mature in the last 20 years and is under very active development and improvement constantly by several hundred developers contributing to its open source
2. Linux is extremely fast and runs very well on even lower end desktops and laptops. It runs quite well even with 286 MB RAM. With 512 it flies on most hardware. Most people today have 1gb or more on their computers
3. Linux is extremely customizable - more than any other operating system in use today and you can modify its looks easily and for free
4. It has a rich suite of productivity applications like OpenOffice, LibreOffice, ApacheOffice among the most popular ones. All of them are feature rich and even provide support for MSOffice file formats
5. Linux supports all software that you may ever want to use normally. With the increasing trend of software applications on the cloud (like Google Drive, Google Office, Office 365 etc.) this is hardly a constraint for Linux
6. Support for Linux is as easy as searching for a term on Google. The tutorials for doing anything on Linux are plenty and easy to find
7. Linux is also pleasing to the eye (an example below of a customized Linux desktop) and with very powerful desktop management systems today (GNOME, KDE among the most popular ones) you can make it look like anything you want - even make it look like a Mac OS or Windows (if that is what you want)
8. Of course it is also free and almost all of the software that you will want to use on it is also free (and mostly opensource)

A Customized Linux Desktop Looks Beautiful

For Developers

1. Linux as a platform is great for developers as well with almost all development tools having excellent support on the platform. Even for Microsoft Technologies - With tools like MONO (http://www.mono-project.com/Main_Page) developers can develop real cross platform .Net applications using C#
2. The well known Android OS for mobile devices is a variant of Linux and it looks like linux is fast gaining mainstream focus as a mobile device platform too

Try it out yourself

If you wish to experience Linux in Action you may want to try out one of the following very popular linux distributions. They run out of the box and install as smoothly as any other popular operating system on your desktop or Laptop:

1. Ubuntu Linux (http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop)
2. Linux Mint (http://www.linuxmint.com)
3. Fedora (http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora)
4. OpenSuse (http://www.opensuse.org/en/)

PS: 

For those who have heard of or tried Chromebooks based on Chrome OS from Google - that too is a cut down version of Linux that is optimized to work with Chrome Browser as the main interface for the users.