Is linux free 5041

MYSQL and a host of other server applications come bundled with virtually all Linux distributions, you don't have to download them from anywhere. As for commercial applications, those are all targeted at Redhat or SUSE, for most of the other distributions you are on your own. Although there are hundreds of Linux distributions there are only a few that matter.

Big corporations primarily use Redhat or SUSE (Novell) because those are the distributions that the commercial software vendors support. The commercial software vendors target Redhat and SUSE because their customers have standardized on them, it's a vicious or virtuous circle depending on how you look at it.

The primary choices for end users are larger. If you use any commercial applications you'll want to either use RHEL or SUSE or one of their cousins like Fedora Core or the RHEL clones. Because FC is closely related to RHEL you can usually run a commercial application that's targeted at RHEL and still get the benefits of a cutting edge distribution. If you only use open source software then you could use any distribution. However only a few distributions are really popular, Fedora and SUSE of course. Mandriva is popular as well as Slackware, Debian and some of the Debian relatives like Ubuntu. Popularity is important for an end user OS because a large user community makes it easier to get online help. More users also improves the quality of a distribution because there are more people finding bugs and it also improves the odds that a particular package is available for that distribution. The hundreds of others distributions are mostly irrelevant.

As for the reasons to use Linux, price isn't it. Price is usually a pretty stupid reason to pick any product let alone an operating system. For price to be compelling the price difference has to be huge and for OSes it isn't. XP Pro is only $150 and XP Home is only $99, so neither is very expensive. The reason to pick an OS is because it serves your needs better. In the server space Linux has been hugely successful because it's a vastly more capable OS then XP. Linux scales better and it works much better in a networked environment. For engineering applications those things matter also. I'm using a half dozen machines simultaneously, two of which are dual processor, I simple couldn't do that with a Windows environment. For typical home users the advantages aren't nearly as significant and there are some major disadvantages that aren't going away anytime soon. For example if what you want to do is play games Linux isn't the OS for you, there are very few games for Linux vs Windows. Linux does better in the media space then it does in the game space but it still isn't quite as capable as Windows. If what you want to do is web surf, do Office type things and do e-mail then Linux is every bit as good as Windows. However every bit as good isn't a compelling reason to switch, there has to be something that's much better. For the typical user the one advantage that Linux has over Windows is that it's much much safer. The amount of malware that's out there for Windows is frightening, there is nothing equivalent in the Linux world. Although it's certainly possible to write a Linux worm it's much much harder to do then for Windows. Also the huge number of Linux variations helps to protect the Linux world from viruses in the same way that genetic variability protects plant and animal populations from diseases. In natural populations it's pretty much impossible for a disease to wipe out a whole population, even the black plague only end 1-3rd of the human population. With genetically identical populations, like farmed grapes or bananas for example, a single variant of a disease can wipe out the whole population. There are only a couple of varieties of Windows, so it's like bananas, there are hundreds of varieties of Linux (there is a new kernel every month for example) so it's like a natural population.

Anyway my point is that if you are doing serious computing then Linux is the obvious choice. If you want to play with a huge array of free applications then Linux is also a good choice. If you are just a home user then the one reason to pick Linux is that it's relatively virus proof.