More yoda talk...
You have much to learn young padawa...
Hopefully we can enlighten you...
firstly...
Linux does not run on Unix, it is an opperating system and as such it runs programs, nothing runs it...
(well actually i'll make it a bit more technical)
in the same way as windows runs on either the Dos or NT kernel, Linux runs on the Linux Kernel and is incharge of interfacing with hardware and software...
Linux is a Unix style OS, that means that it works in roughly the same way as Unix, that is to say that hard drive partitions are not listed as c: and d: they are all found using the OS in terms of their position from the root (/)
and partitions get names, so you can have two partiotions (eg /boot and /home) and then a athird partiton that is just /, /boot and /home are accessible from /
another difference is in linux you have a swap partition rather than a swap file (although you can allocate regular partition space for an extended swap file rather than using the partition.
Linux use ext2 and ext3 formats (typically) for it's disks, although many more formats are available and readable from Linux. (including Fat32 if you are interested in dual booting and sharing a data drive).
Linux doesn't have services, it has daemons (though they are the same thing)...
commands a re different, (so instead of del *.* you have rm *.*) but that's not really important just yet.
There are more desktop styles available for Linux than there are windows, when I say desktop styles I don't mean themes, I mean window managers.
Anyway... now I'll move onto the next part of the confusion here...
Yes, Linux is seen as the hackers OS... but there are some very good reasons for this, most of them are social rather than actual, and the actual reasons no longer actually matter anymore since windows has (stupidly) opened things up a little from the hackers point of view...
anyway, here goes...
Linux is seen as the hackers OS, because most Microsoft machines are hacked into, this isn't really because Linux is so much more secure, (although it is a little more secure), it's more to do with the desktop popularity of windows, and the sloppiness of microsoft coders. now the second part to this is you think that hackers wouldn't realease a virus that could target them would you? exactly, and since most virusses target windows machines, they must *obviously* come from Linux machines...
this of course is crap since most Virruses are now compilled excecutables which must have been made on a windows machine since a linux machine couldn't compile for the windows environment...
The second reason Linux is seen as the Hackers OS, is because in the traditional sense of the word Hacker mean ssomeone who is skilled and adept at coding and making programs better, the open source nature of Linux means that anyone can aceess the source code, hack it about a bit and then compile it for their own purposes...
Thirdly Linux is the hackers OS simply because of the amount access, and the ability to do things that you get, for instance Linux coders have allways been able to have raw packet access, meaning that they are able to craft packets for a specific job, this wasn't available in windows (until the release of XP), so malicious 'hacking' packets had to come from Linux machines.
There is also the issue that there are so many more tools available with Linux than there are with windows, packages like ethereal that all you to capture all network traffic... (but thanks to the open source nature of most Linux projects, a lot have been ported to windows...).
Basically the point I am making here, is that yes, Linux was traditionally seen as the hackers OS, simply because of the power flexibility and amount of tools that you were allowed... however windows now has many of these tools, the power and flexibility have been opened up, and there isn't much call for any 'would be hacker' to even think about Linux...
unless of course they want to get interested in something a little more revolutionary than defacing webpages...