The Question this week is "What is Linux and who would use it?"

Linux is a "user friendly" version of the UNIX operating system.
UNIX was originally developed about 30 years ago and was used primarily as a research operating system in universities, as companies in the 80's began developing high powered work stations, they each developed their own versions of UNIX. This made a unified sale of UNIX hard. Microsoft developed Windows NT to answer this problem. NT offered most of the same features of UNIX but was compatible with all Windows applications. Windows became the leader in the OS world so to speak.
Linux was developed by Linus Torvalds based on UNIX but more user friendly. It is an open source operating system that is free, unlike Windows which can be expensive and had a lot of bugs until the XP verision, LOL. It seems Vista does too. Open source means you can get into the code and modify things yourself, as well as being free.

See: http://computer.howstuffworks.com/question246.htm for more details

The "who" would use it can include: people who want to experiment with their operating system, or need a great deal of control over their operating system and people with PC's who have personal problems with Microsoft and their dominance over the operating system world.

Below is a screenshot of a workstation using Linux

Pick your favorite Registry key (you do have one don't you?) and describe it's importance in detail.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER would have to be my personal favorite registry key. It is the one that lets me tweak the way my computer looks, acts and is the most fun to change. Actually the other registry keys should pretty much be left alone to avoid serious problems with your computer, unless you really know what you are doing. From HKEY_CURRENT_USER, I can rename desktop system icons, sort favorites menu alphabetically, enable/disable window animations, customize Windows Media Player title bar, it can change the default settings for the way things display of just about everything on my computer. One good thing is it only changes things on my log in, leaving the other user's user's settings alone. This key contains user-specific settings that are built from information in the HKEY_USERS key during the logon process. You should always back up your registry before changing anything to it so if you make a mistake you can restore your old settings.