Garfunkel! Yes! I'm calling you....

[Carlos]

....heey....

...uh, I know you don't know me or anything, but I'm looking at the other thread about installing Linux, and I think I like the simplicity of the OS. Well, it looks simple; is it? o_O

And uh, could you do some convincing? What makes it so good? Should I skip Vista altogether, and consider converting to Linux? Is it hard, or easy?

I mean, getting used to the system, that is?

I've never tried anything other than Mac or Windows platforms...and is it there only ONE type of Linux? Because I've heard that its been connected to a variety of names, such as ubuntu and the PS3 version (I forgot what's it called).

And...lastly, where do I download it?

[Garfunkel]

Hey Carlos! yes i know you.

Yes, ubuntu is about as simple as Linux gets. Keep in mind you may be like "oh but that's hard!" but really your just not used to the processes.

There are many things that make Linux good. These include:

Speed - Linux is very fast and efficient, makes terrific use of hardware capabilities.
Secure - As a regular user, you will never have to install any security software to the system, at all. I have literally hundreds of apps to protect windows but on Linux....none.
Powerful - Linux is about as powerful as Operating system come. It allows you to do basically everything out of the box, with full featured word processors and data base applications. It is very expandable.
Configurable/choice - Linux can be configured in any way, shape or form, you can choose how you like the system, what it should do and how it should do it. It's completely open and there is nothing stopping you.

As vista hardly brings any major advantages over XP for a home user, i would heavily recommend at least TRYING Linux in some form or another, learning it's ins and outs. I would suggest switching from windows but if you are hesitant, you can always run them both on the same machine without losing any data. I can show you how.

Linux is easy. You may hear lots of things of how it's hard etc etc. This depends how you look at it, you may think it is hard because you are not used to it, in windows you do something, in Linux it's done in another way. People think using the terminal (command line), which is very important in Linux makes it hard, this is not so, if problems exist in a system the terminal is used to fix things because there are no variables, no matter what your system is like, the terminal will always act the same!

I would say, converting from windows to linux is a very big challenge, don't get me wrong, you may find it hard and may start thinking about giving up at times, but really, once the basics are out of the way it is very very easy (dare i say, easier then windows). Just look at OmniCloud, not really the biggest tech-head in the world but after a few months he is more then capable of running Linux without help! he seems to love it too, so much that he got rid of windows and has never looked back.

Here is what you must understand about the "types of Linux":

Linux is not an operating system, Linux is what's called a "kernel", the most important program in an operating system, it does the basic input and output operations of the Operating system, without it, the system would not function.

A Linux based operating system consists of Linux + many tools and other applications which transform the system into what we call an operating system. These tools are called "GNU tools". There are many many many many tools which you can add to Linux to make an operating system, some users do not need all of them, or have different needs from the operating system, so developers make many different types of the operating system. These are called "Linux Distros" or "distributions". There are hundreds of distros in the world, there is Ubuntu (a system targeted at everyone and is a great learning system, Yellow dog linux (which is what you were talking about earlier), debian, opensuse, fedora, gentoo etc etc. They all target different people and look different and act different, but they are the same basic Linux system.

You can download Linux from the developers page, just do a google search for gentoo, ubuntu etc will show you it.

If you are at all interested in trying Linux, please tell me! Anyone will tell you i am all for expanding Linux.