I have said it before and I will say it again. Linux is the fastest growing operating system that I know of. I do not mean in market share, it is a free (as in beer) operating system, although it is moving up in the marketplace pretty fast.

I mean the actual operating system itself. Ten years ago Linux was a useable system but very rough around the edges. Installation was very error prone and hardware support was a nightmare. User friendly is not a word that could be assigned to a Linux installation.

From that time to this present time Linux has improved itself by leaps and bounds. For quite a while now it has been at the "Granny can use" stage and hardware detection is much better than proprietary programs. You can now take just about any major Linux distribution and run it directly off of a cd rom or usb key and decide whether you like it enough to install it on your computer.

The programs that run on Linux have increased in quality and scope to the point where I believe that there is an equivalent, quality open source program for every single proprietary application in existence.

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