What are the Pro's and Con's of Linux?

When it comes to hardware compatibility, Linux wins especially with older one-off items. I have some old web cams and bluetooth dongles and a few other things that will not work with Windows because there are no drivers available. They work just fine with Linux.

When things break, Linux is usually easy to fix. Windows is not, and most of the time you have to reinstall.

Linux and Linux software is free. Windows and Windows software costs and arm and a leg.

Windows is slow and buggy and has stability problems. Linux almost never crashes.

Windows is better at running games because games are primarily written to run on Windows. Many if not most games will run just fine on Linux, and the games written natively for Linux tend to be faster and more stable than their Windows counterparts.

Windows is more prone to malware, and not just because more people use it. It is easy to compromise Windows and Microsoft software. Using IIS is like putting up a sign saying 'HERE I AM HACK ME".

Linux does not have much in the way of malware and viruses because it is extremely difficult to compromise it.In the ten years I've used linux, I've never once used a firewall or anti-virus, and I've never been infected.

The only downside to Linux is that it requires a bit of technical know-how to install, configure, and maintain. Windows is slightly better in this category, but not by much.

You asked Linux, not windows. Think of the essential difference as this: Windows is a family of consumer OSes for commodity computers. Linux is a more diverse family of technical OSes for commodity computers. Its prehistory began at MIT, where some grad students (and Software luminaries) tried to create a Unix-derived OS called GNU. To make a long story short, one of the principles was modularity so when they ran into trouble with their kernel a grad student in Finland named Linus Torvalds wrote the Linux kernel which allowed him to run those neat UNIX programs on his 386SX. GNU was never intended to be chipset specific so Torvalds and his friends had lots of tools to port the kernel to anything they wanted, and as he was on the internet he had (and made) a lot of influential friends. Universities needed to stretch their computing resources (so did other people: during the nineties Mark Shuttleworth ran an internet security company out of his parents garage in South Africa till it was bought for a billion rand -- the server was a microcomputer running Linux). Movie companies needed disposable networks for their projects (which would end in 3 to 5 years with the films' releases). And Linux blew up among the cognoscenti.

Shuttleworth is historically important because as a South African he saw technology moving down the civilized food chain and released Ubuntu as a way to give back to the community. I love to diss Ubuntu. But its name means "Human gesture" or "Humane gesture" and with the scars still healing from my last bout with it two weeks ago it lives up to it. Definitely.

So Linux is a family of OSes which range from technical like Debian, to business oriented like Red Hat to consumer friendly like Ubuntu (hah) and Android. Its technical origin means it is efficient -- giving me Debian with graphics and animation and wifi all up to date on an old Dell Lattitude D630 I suffered Ubuntu on briefly, and customizable -- yes I'm doing simple animation on that Dell with Inkscape and Synfig.

The con is to really run it you practically have to be a Tech Support yourself. I keep an old copy of Teach Yourself UNIX on my bookshelf but I'm always diving into it. You don't have to be a techie for simple things, but to make it as useful as a consumer OS yes.