Linux is reliable, flexible, massively featured, free and has two great graphical interfaces in Gnome and KDE. It also has thousands of applications. It has long been a favourite operating systems for servers, and has now reached the point where anyone can buy it, install it and use it productively--on the desktop. For small or large business use its advantages in terms of cost, reliability, hardware requirements and ease of maintenance are clear.

All major distributions are available as free downloads but their size makes it sensible to buy a boxed set, which includes manuals, support and often neat stickers and perhaps Tee shirts. RedHat has taken to putting the manual on CD, which is good for searching but not everyone's favourite format.

For Novices

The latest release from SuSE (which comes in Personal and Professional versions) or RedHat (which comes in Standard, Professional and Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES Standard versions) provide you with a fully configured system ready for productive work. All major distributions detect and install support for common hardware automatically. This includes USB along with esoterics such as RAID and video grabbing cards. The high profile players aiming at consumer dekstops such as Corel, RedHat and Suse do this best.

For Workstations

If you want to create a dual boot system on a PC with Windows pre-installed Caldera OpenLinux is easiest. It comes with Partition Magic and automates the process of repartitioning your hard drive and installing OpenLinux. RedHat 9.0 offers a similar feature. Most distributions default to KDE, though RedHat defaults to Gnome. Although all distributions now come with Gnome and KDE, the non-default option is often poorly configured. With RedHat, KDE is unusable unless you know enough to sort it out yourself.

For Servers

Traditionally, Caldera was first choice for servers, and remains excellent. However, Debian is often preferred despite being behind the leading edge because it releases fully debugged, highly stable distros. In practice, you'll get nearly as much reliability with server editions of Linux from RedHat and Suse, and both also sell heavy duty distros configured specifically for Oracle databases (eg: Red Hat Enterprise Edition - Optimized for Oracle 8i).

Applications

For software variety, try Suse, which includes 1500 packages. Debian, which prefers to be called Gnu/Debian (it only ships Free Software) is a close second with 1400. All Linux distributions come with a full suite of Net server and client software (including Netscape), support for most filesystems--including NTFS, networking support for networking protocols including obsolete ones, font servers for TrueType, and more. RedHat and Suse ship with ReiserFS, a full journaling filesystem for critical database applications.

Note what productivity software is included in Linux packages. Sun's excellent StarOffice ships with most Linux distros. It supports MSOffice filetypes, as does Corel's WordPerfect Office. On the commercial front there's the Applixware office suite.

All Linux distributions include The Gimp, a heavy duty image manipulation package similar to Photoshop. Corel sells its CorelDraw program for Linux and there are endless specialised image editors and viewers. gPhoto works with most digital cameras, and there's BTTV for TV and video cards.

All major Linux distributions include a management program. Suse has Yast, RedHat has Linuxconf, OpenLinux has COAS--which could become a standard Linux management tool.