by Robert Pogson

Created on: January 16, 2011

The answer is "YES!". You do want to find, create, display, modify and store information with a minimum of hassles. An operating system designed for that purpose is the one for you. Other operating systems have hidden agendas like locking you into an expensive treadmill of licensing fees, updates, intrusions into your privacy and re-re-reboots. GNU/Linux (the

GNU system, a UNIX pattern, and the Linux kernel) were designed and implemented by the world to do what the world needs done with IT.

One key difference between GNU/Linux and many other operating systems is that the software is distributed under a Free Software licence permitting use, examination, modification and distribution (The Four Freedoms). While Free, here, is about freedom, the result is that much software is available at no cost to the user. This is an amazing value for non-profits, schools, government, businesses, and individuals who get to install as many copies as they need for just the cost of doing the installations. Instead of licensing fees paying for the production and distribution of software, the world pays programmers to write software and donates resources for distribution. It is a totally different way of providing software for information technology and it works. There are hundreds of thousands of programmers employed this way and the movement is growing.

Another key difference between GNU/Linux and other systems is that there is no central control of the software. It is a cooperative product of the world. To help manage the production and distribution of the software, hundreds of thousands of projects developing software and hundreds of organizations called "distros" have sprung up with a framework and tools to manage everything. You can install Debian GNU/Linux, for instance, you can install from a USB drive, a CD, a DVD, over the web or from a local server on more than a dozen different types of hardware from smartphones to mainframes and get automatic updates for 25000 software packages. Debian uses the APT package management system which allows one to sit at a desk and cause any number of PCs on a network to update to the latest version of one or more packages or releases. There are several package managers available in GNU/Linux and they eliminate the problem of updating the operating system, drivers and applications. One application handles everything if all your software comes from the repositories of the distro. The same system handles security patches, installation and

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