Linux has advanced by leaps and bounds in the last few years. It offers a secure, inexpensive (free) Operating System that is virtually free of the threat of viruses, trojans, malicious code and stiff license fees that Microsoft Windows is well known for. Linux is now as easy or easier to install than Windows.

Linux practically NEVER crashes. Free Linux updates are reliable and available for ALL the software on your machine, not just the Operating System as with Windows.

Most if not all the things people do at home on their computers are now available on Linux. Most Linux distributions come with literally thousands of programs, in contrast to Windows that comes with only a pitiful few.

Do you need MS Office? Linux can run OpenOffice, which has EVERYTHING a home user needs in an office suite, for free.

You can even buy a computer with Linux already installed from many of the mass market outlets, like Walmart, for example.

There are many different Linux distributions. Most of the popular distributions such as Mandrake, Fedora, SuSE, Libranet and Lycoris are VERY easy to install. In fact, probably easier to install than than any Microsoft Windows OS.

There are also some "techie" distributions of Linux. These tend to be more for advanced Linux users. The whole point here is "choice". Linux gives you hundreds of choices to choose from. At the core though they all use the same Linux kernel and will run the same programs.

Go to http://www.linux.org/dist/index.html and search for your preferred Linux distribution. I see these choices like a faucet. There are thousands of different kinds of faucets but they all regulate the flow of water in some manner or another.

Almost any computer store or bookstore, here is a short list of websites, for some popular distributions of Linux, you can download for free:

http://www.linux.org/dist/index.html
http://www.linuxiso.org
http://new.mandrakestore.com/
http://www.redhat.com/
http://www.suse.com/
http://www.slackware.com/
http://www.debian.org/

I can't list them all but here's a few important ones:

http://www.reallylinux.com/
http://www.linux.org/
http://www.linuxdoc.org/
http://www.linux.com/
http://www.learninglinux.com/
http://www.linuxjournal.com/
http://www.linuxartist.org/
https://www.seifried.org/lasg/
http://www.ars-technica.com/

Aslo, come to a meeting and ask us questions.