[Academic,Geek] GIS tool under Linux (and other) platform

There is an update notice on freshmeat.net, of a software called GeoTools, which can utilize GIS data from many different sources and in many formats. It says on the freshmeat page:

GeoTools is a GIS toolkit that is used for OGC-based projects via GeoAPI interfaces. It includes two great SLD based renderers and tools for raster access and reprojection as well as plugins for Shapefile, ArcGrid, ArcSDE, Postgis, OracleSpatial, MySQL, and many more.

This could be especially useful for me. Another reason of rejecting Windoze. Maybe try it later.