Wes and George,
I appreciate both of your (very honest) replies. I actually got a pretty
good chuckle from both. And you definitely answered my questions. I guess
what I really should do is get a third hard drive and triple boot all three
OS's. While I tend to agree with you on the hammer and the Rubik's Cube, I
feel the need to at least give Linux a chance. This old dog can at least
learn one new trick...
kevin
In a world of 400G hard drives you can have as many OSes as you want on a
machine. There are a lot of different Linux Distributions to try, they all
have there own characteristics. I prefer Fedora Core, FC4 just came out,
which is free, has an excellent installer, and is very reliable. Mandrake
2005LE is also a good choice. The paid for versions of Mandrake have the
advantage of integrating media players and binary graphics drivers which
Fedora (which uses strictly GPLed components) doesn't do, the free
version of Mandrake doesn't integrate these components. However you can
always add all of the available media players and binary graphics drivers
to any Linux distribution, that's what I do with Fedora.
I pretty much agree with everything that Wes said. However I'd like to
emphasize the following,
Linux is much much easier to install then Windows. Assuming you pick a
recent distribution, Fedora Core 4 for example, it will have all of the
necessary drivers so all you have to do is stick in the DVD, make your
choices, partition your drive and let it do the install. There aren't 12
million reboots like Windows because Linux can install a driver on a
running system unlike Windows which seems to require a reboot every time
you move your mouse. Also Linux distributions are constantly updated, 2 or
3 times a year for most distributions, so the current drivers are all
there. Microsoft goes 5 years between new OS releases and a couple of
years between service pack releases, that means that your XP disk won't
have the necessary drivers for recent hardware. Admittedly it's generally
not that bad a problem because you can download and install the drivers
once you have a running system (more reboots) but it's less convenient.
Administering Linux is also much easier then Windows. People with no Linux
experience, like George, believe that administering Linux is a black art.
In fact most Linux distributions come with a set of graphical admin tools
that are every bit as easy to use as those that come with Windows. Both
Fedora Core and Mandrake have good graphical tools, Mandrake's are a
little better in my opinion. However Linux has another tool called Webmin
which is a browser based admin tool that works for just about all Linux
distributions. Webmin is miles ahead of the standard Windows tools. It
allows you to configure all of the myriad servers that come with a Linux
distribution, it's very easy to understand, gives you a clear
understanding of what's available on your system, and (because it's
browser based) can be run remotely. Of course you can still administer
Linux the old fashion way by editing config files. This sounds hard but
it's not. The magic of text based config files is that you can read them.
On a Windows system you don't know what the admin tools have done because
you can't read the binary config files. When Windows screws up it's much
harder to figure out why. On Linux, even if you use the control panels or
Webmin, you can see the results and fix them if need be.
As for support, that's done mostly though Newsgroups. Every distribution
has it's own group plus there are a number of general groups like
comp.os.linux.misc, comp.os.linux.hardware, comp.os.linux.networking.
You'll find that the quality of the support in a Linux group will be much
better then in a Microsoft group because Linux user's are generally much
more knowledgeable than MS users and also be Linux is a community of users
who use it because they want to not because they have to.
However there are downsides, as everyone has pointed out there isn't much
in the way of games for Linux.
But, after reading different