Why Linux ?

Why bother? Briefly, a PC running Linux looks to the user like a Sun Sparcstation.

It has real multitasking, multiuser capabilities and it has them today.
It has virtual memory, so running a 50Mb image in 16Mb is at least possible.
It will support multiple daemons for such things as mail, ftp, WWW servers.
It allows NFS mounts and exports.
It will run X11 with several different window managers including Motif.
It has complete, working, debugged Internet support - mail, routing, etc.
Most public domain and shareware programs for Unix/X11 will build fairly easily. Linux is standard in the Makefiles of many popular software packages.
Linux has
- Netscape
- The RealAudio server
- Mbone conferencing tools - video, audio, whiteboard - which also run point-to-point
- HotJava (in development)
- X11R6
- The entire GNU programming tools, prebuilt.
- Almost every GNU application.
- Heaps of good, robust multi-platform software.

This page was written in October 1995. Many of the core features in Linux pre-date Windows 95; we had stable networking capability when Microsoft users were struggling with third-party TCP stacks, 16-bit working etc. This server (well, ip address) has been running Linux since around May 1994, and during that time has probably crashed (as opposed to power outage, system upgrade, etc.) less than a half-dozen times. X-11 has locked up rather more often, but can usually be cleared by logging in over the network and killing X (or Netscape).

See also the much more recent Why Linux? page by Alen Peacock