Linux

Linux is the free, open source operating system of choice among Academy students. Various incarnations include the user-friendly Red Hat, Mandrake, Ubuntu and SuSE distributions, as well as Slackware, Debian, Gentoo, and Androgenous Mime. For more information, see the Wikipedia article.

For those who are currently using the Microsoft Windows Operating System but would like to the make switch to something a bit, shall we say, more fun the number of willing Linux geeks ( some more disturbingly hardcore than others ) makes the transition to Open Source much easier.

Besides, come on, all the cool kids are using Linux.

As an interesting side note, the Free Software Foundation promotes the name of GNU/Linx, as Linux is built around the GNU toolkit. However, as GNU tools can be used on any Unix based system (and most have been ported to Windows by now), many feel no need to engage in such pedantics.