Thinking about switching to Linux

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Yes, at least to start with. It is nice to have the old and familiar to fall back on just in case.

As to how to partition: open up gparted in the Ubuntu live session and shrink your Windows partition to give however much space you can spare for Linux.


Ubuntu. There are plenty of other worthy choices, but for new users Ubuntu is the best-supported distro and the easiest to get help with.


Firefox. Chromium is also available if you're a Chrome fan.


If you mean word processing, Abiword is my preferred program. OOo Writer is fine too, but a bit slow.


VLC or Gnome Mplayer, both of which are available in the Ubuntu Software Center.


If you already use Eclipse or Netbeans, those are still available in Linux. Otherwise there's Geany (a lightweight IDE) or just your preferred text editor. Ubuntu comes with Gedit, which works fine. Some people will tell you that real programmers use Vim or Emacs. I like Vim.


Ubuntu is going through some radical UI changes next spring, and you may not like the new thing. Linux Mint is basically Ubuntu with extra bits (like Flash and codecs) preconfigured, and they have stuck to a more traditional appearance. You can always switch to Mint, or just install Mint instead of Ubuntu.

There are Linux installs that'll run from a flash drive too - a little faster than the CD, and because they're configured to be small they have less to do.

Once you get past the install, you'll be hard pressed to avoid command lines. Ubuntu 10.10 is better that way, but still... 10.10 comes with Firefox and Open Office (as well as an assortment of other things)

Be cautious too - there are a lot of out of date tutorials out there

Definitely double check the dates on tutorials. Things have changed so much over the years.

The terminal is pretty easy to avoid(but still much more common than windows). Mostly it seems prevalent because its the fastest way to explain how to do things. Easier to copy/paste some text than upload screen captures.

As long as the data is elsewhere Linux can feel content on as little as 8 GB of space, but you probably do want to give it more than that.

I'd give each system half of the harddisk.

Debian is a neat distribution, so is Ubuntu. Last I tried, Gentoo was very neat to use and rather slim, but it might not be the most newbie friendly distro out there.


Web browsing: Konqueror, Firefox
document editing: Kate, LyX, OpenOffice if your system can handle it*
media playback: music123**
C++ program development: get a favorite text editor and you'll start doing everything in it... joe is what I use, you might prefer kate.



Stay away from Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup! That additing game will eat all your free time! Despite being in textmode.

Oh, and as a heuristic: any graphics card will less than 2 Megabytes of video memory will be a pain in the ass to set up.

* I have used linux on many craptops and shitboxen which couldn't, anything from this century should though.
** Yes, it is a command line application, but I cannot bear GUI music players. They are such a hassle...

I give the system ("/") 15 gigs usually. Apps install there. Lately its creeped up to 45, but thats way too much. I give the "home" partition several hundred. All my personal data resides there.




Most of those things are going to be present right off the bat. For video editing you can grab kdenlive or something. Check the built in software center under sound and video.


All are preinstalled except for the c++ development. I am a light coder, so I prefer Geany.



Find a web site on "first 10 things to do after installing..." Ubuntu for example.



Dont buy one. There are free ones, and the sort of books that have official publishers tend to be way behind. Consider Ubuntu: there have been 10 versions released in the last 5 years. Any book ready for print is going to be 1.5 to 2 years out of date.

Good to see a thread, here, about this, already. :B I'm intending to use Ubuntu on my new computer, and since I have an AMD64 processor, I was going to get the 64-bit version, to enjoy the improved speeds. However, I have been intending to virtually run Guild Wars on it, and some other games, with CrossOver, or any other, maybe better emulator, so I'm just wondering if running in 64-bit may be a problem for a game made for 32-bit? Or will it just work even better? Seems like it should, considering the resources needed for emulation, but better ask, first... sure hope it'll be fine, though... -_- really wanted to go 64-bit.

Go 64.

Wine/Crossover are already designed to deal with that 32/64 divide, and there are good compatibility libraries anyway. You can install the ia32 lib from synaptic if you need to.

You can do this fairly easily. You may have to reinstall Windows to one of the partitions you've created, and I would suggest installing it before Linux, because Windows tends to destroy the contents of other partitions, according to what I've read.



Ubuntu for ease of use, Debian for a wider selection of packages to install, Slackware, Arch, or Gentoo if you want to get it to work exactly as you want. There are open-source alternatives for everything you've listed. Most office suites, including OpenOffice.org, can open, create, and process Microsoft Office documents. There is plenty of multimedia software available for Linux. If you want to program in C++ using .NET there's MonoDevelop, which is used to create software in Mono, an open-source implementation of .NET.



Web browsing: Firefox, Chrome, Opera, or Epiphany. Avoid Konqueror at all costs.
Document editing: OpenOffice.org or GNOME Office
Media playback: For sound, Amarok. For video there are several, though I have little experience with them, so I can't say what's best.
C++ program development: Depends on the framework. There are IDEs for GTK+, Qt, and Mono (which I mentioned above), all of which can compile C++.



Too vague. Can't answer.

Does Debian have a wider selection of packages available than Ubuntu? I haven't ever gotten that impression. If anything Ubuntu has (very slightly) more software available than Debian.

To the OP and any other Linux newbies: Avoid Slackware, Gentoo, and Arch at all costs. Those are for experienced Linux users who want extra geek cred.