A Chequer-Board of Nights and Days

Okay.  So: what is Linux, other than an excuse for wannabe-12-year-old-girls like myself to coo over penguins?

Linux, like Windows, is an operating system for your computer.  As there are different versions of Windows -- 98, XP, Vista, Bob -- there are lots, and lots and lots and lots, of different versions of Linux.  To make a very long story short, the basic architecture of Linux is available for anyone with the requisite knowledge and skills to tinker with.  It's as if Pejman took a copy of Windows, made some changes, and released Windows Chequerboard, with a little applet that automatically gave you Chelsea scores in the lower right-hand corner, and I took that same copy, made some other changes, and released Windows Kawaii, where all the icons had been replaced by images from this site.  DistroWatch will give you an idea of just how many versions, and versions of versions, there are.

When I was still on Windows and considering my options, my husband ordered me to read In the Beginning Was the Command Line, a short (and free!) Neal Stephenson book that explains, better than I have here, the differences between the approaches taken by Windows, Apple, various forms of Linux, and other operating systems such as BeOS.  Stephenson doesn't cover Linux in enough detail to help you with distinguishing between the various versions (distributions, as they're usually called), but reading In the Beginning should leave you with a bit better grasp of what difference the OS makes.

Now: which distribution?  Linux Online will help get you started, but the answer is: it depends.  If you are as clueless as I've been assuming you are, Ubuntu is a very good distribution: it's famous for having a much simpler installation than many other distributions.  The other advantage of Ubuntu is that you can burn (or order) a CD, pop it into your CD-ROM drive, and play around with a mini-version of Ubuntu without disturbing your Windows system underneath. 

It is possible to have both Windows and a Linux distribution on the same computer, by the way.  It is beyond the scope of my technical knowledge, and my computer is Kubuntu-only, so I'm not going to discuss this further.  But there is information out there if that's the way you want to go. 

Next in the series: how to live without Microsoft Office.