The VAR Guy recently visited his son’s high school. During that field trip, our resident blogger noticed several dozen Windows XP systems — which will face Microsoft’s XP end of life deadlineon April 8, 2014. Microsoft (MSFT) could win lots of Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 business as schools dump older offerings. But then again another big winner could be Google Chromebooksfrom Acer, Asus, HP, Lenovo, Samsung and Toshiba. Here’s why.

Roughly 22 percent of U.S. school districts now run Google Chromebooks, the low-cost, cloud-centric notebooks, according to Business Insider. Admittedly, some of those schools may have only a handful of Chromebooks. But NPD Group, a market research firm, claims Chromebooks represented 3.3 percent of back-to-school system sales.

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GNU is a stable, powerful, flexible operating system that respects users’ privacy and promotes freedom.

As any web administrator can tell you, the overwhelming majority of PCs run some version of the Microsoft Windows operating system, with Apple’sMac OS X (the Mac isn’t usually referred to as a “PC” but it is) coming in a distant second, and all other OSes trailing far behind it. GNU (usually called “Linux” or, alternately, “GNU/Linux”) has less than 2% of the market. Many Windows users are content with their OS and, with the rise of mobile computing (and a corresponding decrease in desktop use), most of them can’t think of any good reasons to switch operating systems. Here are five reasons why you should make the switch today:

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