Well, it isn't your computer; it's my computer, sitting in a server farm somewhere in Sunnyvale, California. It has nearly 100% uptime (3 minutes of downtime over the last year), a static IP address you can point domains at or use to host your own Counter Strike or Minecraft server, and particularly it has a 1Gb/s (128 megabytes per second) sustained upload and download speed, so you could actually host a high-bandwidth popular media streaming server or website or something. Because it is only accessible remotely, it forces you to use the terminal, which means you will be diving into the 'real stuff' right away.

To the layman, this means you can host your very own website! For free, none of this $20/month business!

Also, there's a small community of users on the server who like to talk to each other using the rudimentary posix 'talk' program, localhost irc, etc.

Also, I love teaching people about linux, telling them about all the cool projects they can set up if they only have a linux box with a static IP, and I will talk your ears off if you want me to, while guiding you through learning things.

Or if you aren't interested in learning and are just looking for a persistent box to use 'screen' to stay logged into IRC all the time, I can give you that too (latest weechat git builds, latest irssi source builds, etc)

It'll also give you a great feel of what it was like to use a computer in the 1980's.

The benefit here isn't the operating system, it's the persistent uptime, the community, the static IP, and the extremely high thoroughput connection.