Many categories of users may be interested in using Linux for various reasons. It is not possible to give an exhaustive list. However, here are some examples.
Linux is a complete 32-bit (64-bit on the DEC AXP platform) operating system that uses the computer to its full potential. Linux turns an IBM PC into a real work station. For the price of a personal computer, which is much lower than the cost of a workstation.
The price advantage is very large because in addition to the savings on hardware, the software in Linux comes with a free license allowing unlimited free copying of the system. The kernel, editors, translators, DBMS, networking, GUIs, games, and thousands of megabytes of other software are free and legal.
The gain on the software alone can be thousands to tens of thousands of dollars.
For the pirate market, not paying for software is commonplace. However in the case of Linux, not only no one will prosecute for this, but full documentation will be given! Moreover, with the source code of all the programs! Pirates would never dream of this.
Linux is very interesting for the users and the application developers. Imagine a company with several branches located in different parts of the city or even in different cities or countries. The parent company runs a database server, the customers – the workstations in the branches – via a network interact with the server. Such a system is quickly, cheaply and conveniently done in Linux. Think about the resilience of Linux. This is where it comes in handy!
Suppose you are a developer of commercial software for commercial operating systems such as SCO Unix, Solaris or DOS. You use a multiplatform compiler, a powerful multi-window debugging system, emulators and compatibility systems. Linux has all this. You can put it on your home PC and if you have a modem you can go to work just to get your paycheck. By the way, you need some stability here too. Imagine you have a couple dozen windows open and you do a lot of work and the system hangs. This does not happen with Linux.
What if you are a researcher and you write articles for international magazines? The TeX publishing system is at your service in Linux and accepts articles for these journals. You can send the article by e-mail directly from your Linux machine. While you were writing the article, the machine was doing a long complicated calculation and it didn’t bother you at all. And the arrays in your program are not limited by the 640 KB limit at all. Do you want an array of 50 Mbytes? Please do, even if you only have 8 MB RAM, as Linux has virtual memory. Do you think it is nice to encounter an OS hang when you are three minutes away from the end of a three hour calculation? In Linux you are not in danger of that.
Maybe you need to synthesize a professional quality advertising picture? While the rendering system does this, you can play DOOM. Or debugging the description of another picture. Rendering a complex picture takes hours. The stability of the OS can’t hurt here either.
The emphasis here is on OS stability for a reason. The user, whose practice is limited to DOS and especially MS Windows, is used to the idea that freezes are an inherent property of the OS. Quite the opposite is true.
Linux opens the door to a gigantic world of open systems, with a wide variety of tools to accomplish a wide variety of tasks.
Characteristics of Linux as an operating system.
It is
Multitasking : many programs running at the same time;
multi-user mode : many users working at the same time on the same machine;
A protected mode of the processor (386 protected mode);
process memory protection ; program failure will not cause a hang-up;
Economical booting : Linux only reads from the disk the parts of the program actually used for execution;
Page separation on writes between instances of a running program. This means that process instances of a program may share memory during execution. When such a process tries to write to memory, the 4k page that is being written to is copied to the free space. This feature increases performance and saves memory;
Virtual memory with page organization (i.e. not the whole inactive process is pushed to disk, but only the needed page); virtual memory in separate disk partitions and/or file system files; up to 2 Gbytes of virtual memory; changes of virtual memory size during program execution.