Quote - Whats the difference between the different flavors of Unix?

With Unix, there are relatively few flavours - mainly variations introduced by various mainframe manufacturers or educational establishments to suit their hardware or requirements.

Linux is a different, though Unix compatible, OS. The diverse amount of flavours here represent various collections of software and optimisations for a large variety of platforms and applications.

For example, there are distibutions aimed at newcomers (Ubunto, Mandriva, etc.), distro's for power users, tweakers, hobbyists, musicians. Some are designed to run on older hardware, some for servers, some for desktops, some for games - in fact, if you can think of a specialist computing requirement, there is probably a distro aimed at those users already.

There are also distro's aimed at the free and open-source purists that contain no proprietry software, and others that are packed with closed source drivers and apps.

Hence the huge choice available. And the beauty of it all is that, in most cases, all it will cost you is the download time.

Plus, if you wish to modify anything (from software right through to the kernel itself), and you are able to program, then you are free to modify the code to your hearts content. The source code for most software is usually downloadable as well. And if your modifiacations are good, you can submit them back to the core teams for possible inclusion in later releases.

The only drawback is that it is not quite as easy to use as Windows - but they are working on that and have made considerable progress over the last few years. :-)