It can be problematic and much harder or involved to solve various distro quirks. Stay away if you find winxp usable otherwise dive in but be prepared to learn command line and hand edit config files. Pray that all your hw is linux friendly as well and that you will find linux drivers for your hw. I find ubuntu a very good distro but I like windows better. My win98 runs circles around it as speed goes. You'll need 256mb for ubuntu.

It's been a learning experience for me. I did what others said they did about a year ago. Installed mandrake, used it for a few months, then windows crashed and took linux with it and I didn't reinstall it. Lately, I deleted windows xp and installed fedora core3. Took me some time to get a modem to work, and it was frustrating. After that I crashed it a few more times trying to edit config files. Now it's mostly fun. I've learned more about programming in the last few months than in a year or two of using windows. You have to compile a lot more, fix more, and write more to get what you want. I'm on the internet a lot trying to figure things out. C++ is my second language. Not Microsoft c++, the real thing. I don't plan on going back.

In Linux you can do almost any thing you can do in windows and vise versa.

But the one thing you need is patience.

In linux many useful programs are command line only (or you have to do some research to find the gui front end.) Expect to spend many hours reading manuals because the software simply isn’t as user friendly as windows software.
You may want to do some research into which distro has the best support for your hardware. You take hardware support for granted in windows but with linux many of your peripherals will not have the required drivers to operate. (e.g. Web camera, sound card, win modem, video card just to name a few) Most of your games wont work either. If you are unlucky and have hardware problems like I did and want to get things working your going to need to work at the command line and manually edit config files which can be a big pain.

Well the pluses of Linux are
Linux you learn a lot more (because you have to)
You get everything for free
You get to be in with the Linux crowd
Reported to be more stable than windows (this is mostly true)

The main down side to linux is
Lack of hardware support
Lack of user friendlyness

Quote: Original post by try_catch_this
Well the pluses of Linux are
Linux you learn a lot more (because you have to)
You get everything for free
You get to be in with the Linux crowd
Reported to be more stable than windows (this is mostly true)

The main down side to linux is
Lack of hardware support
Lack of user friendlyness

I'd say that's right on, based on my (somewhat limited) experience.

Just on a side note it is very stable. We decided to use RedHat on one of our servers where I work and never once had a problem with it. The only time we needed to restart it was when we ran out of ports to access PICK. Since we fixed the problem of it not releasing the ports we have not restarted yet.

For livecd's, I'm new to linux as well, pick Slax liveCD, or Suse KDE LiveCD, those are pretty good and should get you up in running once you get use to the linux environment. Try to download alot of live cd's and try them out they are pretty cool and are a great wa to preview something.

One linux distro that my dad found that I thinkI may want ot try so I can get schoolwork done is called, topogolinux which runs ontop of windows.

here is the url
http://www.topologilinux.com

Quote: Original post by UltimaX
Just on a side note it is very stable. We decided to use RedHat on one of our servers where I work and never once had a problem with it. The only time we needed to restart it was when we ran out of ports to access PICK. Since we fixed the problem of it not releasing the ports we have not restarted yet.

The kernel itself is stable, but the GUI (as in, Xwindows) is anything but stable. It crashed on me quite a few times in the past, and once it managed to crash the whole machine (absolutely everything was dead), but that was due to some Nvidia drivers problems.

I reckon a lot of the difference between Linux and Windows can be summed up as: "From Windows to Linux you exchange user-friendliness for power and flexibility." Though the user-friendliness gap is always getting smaller.

X has been stable for me. I have used this gentoo box as my main desktop for a while and I don't remember it crashing for me ever. I don't remember Windows XP ever crashing for me when I used it either so maybe I'm just lucky that way. Or I have a crappy memory.

Thanks for the feedback, guys.

Yikes, I'm not too interesting in a lot of manual configuration, if it's necessary, nor doing any excess programming, as someone mentioned. Don't have the time. Don't even mention trying to compile the thing. I couldn't even manage to compile Allegro, gods how I tried, much less an entire OS. I'll look into a couple livecds, that sounds good.

As long as I can run it alongside Windows there wouldn't be a whole lot to lose by installing it. Being able to access all my other data would be a plus. Does Linux support NTFS partitions?