Why do people like Linux so much?

Having spent the last playing around with the Eee PC I'm left completely puzzled.  Why do people like Linux so much?  Maybe I just don't get it, who knows?

I finally got online with my Eee yesterday, but only by a tethered ethernet connection.  I don't have WiFi at my place and can't get the Eee and my 3G phone aquainted modem-wise.  It works great online, Flash video works great (YouTube etc) and clicking on Shoutcast streams sends them to the Eee's music player.  Easy peasy.  I had no problems having music streaming and having multiple tabs open whilst browsing.  I even had ITV Local's video service working (but not 100% well) - if anyone in the UK has tried that they'll know it's a huge hog on resources even on relatively powerful machines.

Back to the subject of the post, Linux.  I'm not a fan of Firefox so I decided to get Opera going.  Was it a simple case of downloading the correct version from Opera's website and then clicking on open when it finished downloading?  No, of course not!  I had to trawl through the FAQs and How To's on an Eee dedicated site and then follow a bunch of fairly complicated instructions to get it working.  In other words, there were lots of hoops to jump through and even when I finished with a successful result, I still have no icon anywhere to click on to run Opera.  I have to type in the command each time, not exactly user friendly!

I guess I'm in the middle of those that this machine is targetted at.  I'm neither a tech-spert or someone that just wants to use what's on it straight out of the box.

One thing I do know, is that I'll have to get XP on this ASAP.  If for nothing else I'd like Slingbox on it, a decent media player that is crippled by licencing issues and be able to run the likes of Nokia's PC Suite.