I think we need to add this question. Here are some unpolished sentences that I think inform the eventual answer: Linux is a computer operating system. Other operating systems you probably already know about include Windows and DOS. Linux is different from these in many ways, but the most important difference is that it's very powerful and it's absolutely free. If you ever had a dialup shell account in the past where you used programs like pine and lynx, that's what you'll get with linux right on your very own computer. How hard it is to use will depend on what kinds of things you're comfortable with, and how much you want to do. If you don't mind typing commands to get a program that works fast and doesn't crash, you'll love linux. And, the sky's the limit for what you can do with it.
