Well, I feel, as the first male responder after Ongaku's post, and also being a total retard, as soon as I open up an online game, I think it's justified to say this:
OMG!!!!!111!!!1 Ag1rl!!!11one! Ur h07 l3t5 Cyb3r!1 LOLZ!!11!! ROFL!!11
okay, the stupidity partially out of the way, lemme start picking out everything to be changed, or explained better, in this post conveniantly located below, in a quote, to empty out my stupidity quota:
For serious its just an open source operating system which is basicaly software like MS DOS, Windows, Mac OS and Unix ect. Open source as in its free and is written (programmed) by anyone who wants to add a peice of code or just anyone for free. Its fully customisable and comes in many different distrobutions for example Ubuntu or Red Hat. Comes in Text based os or GUI (graphical user interface). It can be dual booted with windows or any other OS. Runs Open GL as opposed to directx, has difficult extensions and dosnt run .exe boo who you sometimes need to use the command terminal to install stuff.
Is murder for newbies to use because dosnt have one common extension, package installer or even type of file system.
Is even more murder if it dosnt even have a GUI and is text only.
Wont run any of your windows programs but its programs are generaly better programed.
Is light on resources and can is programmed to perform better.
Yes, it runs OpenGL as opposed to DirectX, primarily, because DirectX is a closed platform, not just because it chooses to do so (I guess the name
OpenGL is a bit obvious it'd be used by an
open-source OS.
It's not really murder to use, it's a piece of piss most of the time, unless you wish to modify something yourself, at which point, of course it's difficult, if you don't understand the code, frameworks, etc.
It has plenty of common extensions between Linux distros, to the point, most if not all, Linux distros are quite compatible with each other. If they weren't, then Linux would really be lost, and there would be no non-technical users with it installed
The package installers are another matter, there is a possibility of using packages across distros, for example, rpm packages can be used on Debian based OSs, they jsut require conversion, which is a simple command, if you have the correct things installed... actually, yeah that is a bit of a problem there though
File systems for Linux distros are supported commonly between the ones I've seen. ReiserFS, Ext2, and Ext3, are the three most common, while Ext3 is the one most used, by the latest releases of Distros. Also, basically all distros I've seen have brilliant support for NTFS, FAT, HFS, etc. which are older, or proprietary file systems. NTFS, being the only one that's still a bit risky to access and write files to, from within Linux.
The command prompt is actually quite calming IMO
Has very very good GUIs about though. KDE is brilliant, although I prefer the simplicity that is GNOME, a bit more atm. The smaller GUIs are reall quite something though, FluxBox coming to mind, brilliant GUI, without being heavy, and still intuitive.
Correction:
WILL run some Windows programs, just not natively, needs Wine installed, to get things working. Either way though, works a lot better now, and allows for some of the bigger, most used programs to operate. And if they don't run, there are plenty of free alternatives, that quite possibly are better, including the features you actually want and need, rather than random useless crap, you sometimes get given.
Light on resources; depends, use DSL, or Puppy, or Feather Linux distros, and they are light on the system's resources, but it can really vary greatly.