What are few of the reason for choosing Linux/ Unix as an oprating System ? Pros & Cons as well?

Answer 1

Pros:
- Most Linux distributions as well as the BSDs and Solaris are available for free.
- Open Source: You can freely modify the source code for most programs coming with Linux distributions. Don't like the way a program works, or miss a feature? Program it yourself!
- Free Software (free as in speech, not as in beer): See above - you can freely modify the source code and distribute your modified versions. Also, since more eyes see the source code, bugs are found quicker than if only a limited group of developers has access to the source code.

Cons:
- Zealotry. From my personal experience there are just too many Free/Open Source zealots with a holier-than-thou attitude towards users of, say, Windows. In my opinion they're not helping their case; quite the contrary.
- Lack of a standardised GUI. Let's face it, Windows or the Mac OS succeeded because both introduced a user interface which follows certain standard behaviours. Linux on the other hand has no standard GUI - there are the two main players, KDE and GNOME, and many smaller projects, all of which are to be used differently. Not to mention that GNOME programs by default look alien under KDE and vice versa.(Yes, I know that this can be tweaked. It's a pain in the rear though.)
- Hardware support. While the situation is continually improving, the hardware support for Linux/UNIX is still nowhere near the support for Windows.

For the curious I'd suggest playing with a live CD to see if your hardware is supported at all and to be able to try out the OS without having to install it. Examples are Knoppix (-> http://www.knoppix.org ), Freespire (-> http://www.freespire.org ) and Ubuntu (-> http://www.ubuntu.com ).

Answer 2

Frank's answer is excellent. Just adding a few thoughts:
- UNIX especially (and Linux to a slightly lesser degree) is primarily used as a server operating system, not so much as a workstation system
- you would choose to run your server on UNIX (or Linux) if the software you want to run requires that. Example: if you want to run Oracle databases, you practically need UNIX servers. Same thing with big commercial packages like Siebel, SAP or Peoplesoft
- as a former system administrator, I can tell you that the tools to administer large numbers of UNIX servers are vastly superior to those for administring large numbers of Wintel servers. While Microsoft is getting better with every new generation of their server operating systems, they are not there yet. Administring 50 Windows NT4 server boxes is a nightmare; 50 Windows 2003 boxes are much easier to supervise. But even this is nowhere as easy as taking care of 200+ UNIX nodes
- under UNIX/Linux you simply have much more control over what the operating system does; Windows takes much of the control away from you and decides what is best for you. Don't get me wrong: for >90% of users, this is a very good thing. But then again, for the 10% or so geeks and hackers, this is why they prefer UNIX
- and finally, another argument from the commercial world: you get machines running UNIX that simply have much more horsepower than even the strongest Wintel servers you can buy. I'm not even talking about supercomputers. But you would need a whole Wintel server farm with 64 processor boxes to do the work of one HP Superdome UNIX machine. Again, not an argument for the private user, but very important for businesses

Answer 3

Linux/Unix is open-source, available at no value, has an exceedingly good kernel, and scales nicely (to larger or smaller standards). living house windows (any) and OS X can't meet any of the above. ------------ Open-source: means in case you need to alter some thing, your programmers can look on the source code and make differences as mandatory. (you will hardly go with this, in spite of the incontrovertible fact that it incredibly is astonishing to renowned.) additionally, your programmers can look on the source code to examine for bugs/errors/malicious code. unfastened!: unfastened as in 'unfastened beer' good Kernel: good success crashing it. No, relatively. circulate forward and attempt. Scales nicely: Linux can certainly be ported to a multi-motherboard monster server; or can certainly be scaled all the way down to a tiny 12mhz microcontroller (in a robotic, or an mp3 participant for example). additionally, ask some sysadmins whilst grow to be the final time they had to reset their living house windows server. they're going to say some thing like "final Tuesday." Ask the sysadmins whilst they final had to reset the Linux server, they're going to say "i think of it grow to be 1992."

Answer 4

Pros: Stable, hard to get virus, secure, makes people look like computer professionals.

Cons: Hard to use , not a lot software.