What is Linux, and Why Australians Are Switching

Most people only stop to ask what is Linux after something has gone wrong with the computer they already own. For a lot of Australians, that moment landed on 14 October 2025, the day Microsoft stopped sending security updates to Windows 10 and left millions of perfectly good machines exposed.

The timing was almost comical. That same week, the Australian Signals Directorate released its annual cyber threat report and named outdated, unpatched technology as one of the most immediate risks facing the country. In plain terms, the national cyber authority told everyone to stop running software that no longer gets fixed, in the exact week the most common operating system in the country stopped getting fixed.

If you are reading this on a Mac and feeling smug, do not. Apple plays the same game with a nicer finish. It decides when your hardware is too old for the latest macOS, the data collection is built into the system whether your machine is new or not, and you cannot remove it, because you do not control it. Windows or Mac, the trap is the same. You paid for the computer, but it still works for the company that made it rather than for you.

You have two options when your operating system reaches the end of the road, or when you simply decide you have had enough. Buy a new computer you did not need, or put a better system on the one you have. Linux is the second option, and it is a great deal more capable than most people have been led to believe. Here is what it is, why it is built differently, and why we build our privacy computers on it.

What is Linux?

Linux is an operating system, the layer of software that lets you and your programs talk to the machine. You click, you type, you open a browser and a document, the same as you always have. In that sense it does the same job as Windows or macOS.

The difference is who controls it. Linux began in 1991 when a Finnish student named Linus Torvalds shared the core of a free operating system online and invited the world to improve it. Three decades on, it is maintained by a global community of developers rather than a single corporation with a quarterly earnings call. The code is open, free to download and use, and free to change.

Because the code is open, Linux comes in many flavours, called distributions or “distros”. Think of them as different builds of the same engine, each tuned for a different driver. The well-known names include Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora and Linux Mint. You do not need to know all of them. You need one that is set up well, and that is the part we handle.

If all of this still sounds niche, here is the part that surprises people. You almost certainly use Linux every single day without realising it.

It does not stop at phones. Linux runs about 96 per cent of the top one million web servers and the overwhelming majority of cloud computing, which means nearly every website you visit and app you open is served to you by a Linux machine. The question was never whether Linux is good enough for serious work. It already does almost all of the serious work in the world. The only place it is rare is on the desktop in front of you, and that is a habit, not a limitation.

Is Linux hard to use?

This is the myth that keeps people on an operating system they do not like. Years ago, running Linux meant typing commands into a black screen and reading forums at midnight. That has not been true for a long time.

The desktop we set up looks and behaves much like the Windows or Mac desktop you already know. There is a menu in the corner, a taskbar, a settings panel, a file manager and a software store where you install programs with a single click. If you can use a smartphone, you can use this. Most of our customers tell us the transition took an afternoon, not a fortnight, whichever system they came from.

What you gain is room to breathe. No nagging upgrade prompts, no mystery background processes chewing through your memory, no advertising baked into the start menu. The machine does what you ask and then gets out of the way, which is how a tool is supposed to work.

The programs you already use have free equivalents

The biggest worry we hear is about software. You have spent years inside Microsoft Office or the Adobe suite, and the thought of losing your work is genuinely frightening. It should not be. The open-source world has built mature, capable replacements for almost everything, and they read and write the same file formats.

The standout is LibreOffice, a full office suite with a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation tool that opens and saves your existing Word, Excel and PowerPoint files. You can keep working with the documents you already have and share them with colleagues who are still on Microsoft, with no drama.

• GIMP handles photo editing in place of Photoshop.
• Inkscape covers vector and logo work in place of Illustrator.
• Audacity records and edits audio.
• Your browser, your email, your banking and your streaming services all work exactly as they do now, because they run in the browser regardless of the operating system underneath.

You do not have to take our word for any of this. Download LibreOffice onto your current Windows or Mac computer today, open your real documents in it, and see for yourself before you change a thing. That is the FreedomTech way. Privacy is a process you can test, not a leap of faith.

Why Linux is more private and more secure by design

Privacy and security on Linux are not bolt-on features. They fall out of the way it is made.

Start with the open code. When anyone in the world can read the source, a hidden tracker or a quiet data-collection routine has nowhere to live. Tens of thousands of developers, researchers and privacy advocates are reading along, and a problem found is a problem fixed, usually fast and for free. Compare that with Windows or macOS, where the code is sealed and you are asked to simply trust the company that profits from your data.

Then there is the business model, which is the part that matters most. Microsoft and Apple both make money from your attention and your information, and both operating systems are built to gather it. Apple sells itself as the private choice, but macOS still reports back to Apple, and because you do not control the system you cannot switch that off or pull it out. Hardening a Mac only goes so far when the data collection is built into the operating system itself. Linux Mint has no such incentive. It collects no usage data and sends nothing back about who you are or how you use your computer. The machine works for you instead of reporting on you.

Security follows the same logic. Linux is targeted far less often than Windows, its permission model makes it harder for malware to take hold, and most users run safely without antivirus software, though a firewall and a trustworthy VPN never go astray. We will be straight with you, because we always are. Linux is not unhackable, and anyone who tells you a computer is completely secure is selling you something. What Linux gives you is a system built on sound foundations, kept current by people with nothing to gain from your data, on hardware you actually control.

Why we build on Linux Mint

There are hundreds of distributions, and choosing well is most of the battle. We build every FreedomTech privacy computer on one of them, namely Linux Mint with the Cinnamon desktop. That is a deliberate decision, not a default, and here is the reasoning.

You can read Linux Mint’s own position on data collection and confirm it for yourself. When we hand you a FreedomTech machine, the operating system is already installed, configured, hardened and ready to use. You turn it on and get to work, with none of the setup and none of the guesswork.

Making the switch the easy way

If you want the full picture of how Australians are moving across, start with our hub on why Australians are switching to Linux laptops, and if you are still weighing your options, our honest comparison of Windows, Mac and Linux on privacy lays the three side by side. When you are ready for a machine that arrives configured and ready to use, that is exactly what we build.

FreedomTech · The Privacy Experts · freedomtech.com.au