If you compare "getting into Linux" with "getting into Adobe CS" then I think the cost does have an effect. For example I'm interested in digging into the funct

If you compare "getting into Linux" with "getting into Adobe CS" then I think the cost does have an effect. For example I'm interested in digging into the functionality offered by both, but I've never felt that I could justify the cost of the Adobe tools. So the fact that Linux is free was a strong influence. Curious people could speculatively purchase a lot of things, books for example; cost is often, naturally, a constraint. In the days when Netscape Navigator was a closed-source binary blob on Linux, everyone ran it anyway (it was free). It was the only way to get the functionality.