Yep but as they say in the article "compatibility is around 95%", which is not good enough. Not knocking any particular product, it's just that having something 100% compatible with Microsoft Office is a requirement for many businesses.
In my opinion the most common reasons for people using Linux are nowadays cost and performance. It's free, which when compared to £100+ for a non-upgrade version of Windows 8 is a pretty good deal. Performance comes down to two areas: the fact that Linux will generally give you a much better...
'cat /proc/cpuinfo' gives CPU info on most standard linux systems, and (wait for it) 'cat /proc/meminfo' does the same for memory. Unless you want to know details of the physical sticks, in which case try 'sudo lshw'.