I recently read this
POST
I get the feeling that many people either don't use Linux, or don't understand its power. The power is that their in a standard, and the compilers come from GNU and WORK. I have found that the compiler that came with the robot is not very good. If we linux on the robot, then we could use any OS we want to program.
To load the code we could use NFS, FTP, HTTP, SSH, Telnet and millions of other protocols to load. Imagine programming literally on the robot (NFS, SSH), no loading. just compile and go!
Also the compilers are standard, and GNU compilers work everywhere.
Also the choice of platform, currently it is very hard to program on Linux. If it were Linux then I could use Mac, Windows, Linux, BSD, etc.
And last, this is robotics! Why wouldn't we use Linux, I am sure that the CS departments at major colleges use Linux (otherwise I will be very sad).
US First probably spend a long time writing the OS, I could probably install Gentoo fairly easily (haven't tried, I am not that dumb).
Basically Linux runs the computing world (servers), so why not ours!