More Random thoughts of Josh Dye

I know there have been many articles on this subject, but none really give a simple answer to this question.

My answer, usually not. Actually, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to use linux, in fact there are distributions that your grandmother could use.  If your a long-time windows user and your just sick of Microsoft, a good distribution is Xandros.  Note that this distribution is $100 USD, but they do offer a free 30-day trial of the desktop edition and a free 90-day trial of the server edition; they have also released a previous version of Xandros for free- the download page is here.

Mt distribution of choice would probly be Ubunutu.  This distribution is easy to install, has good hardware support, has a large community to answer your questions and it’s free.  It comes in a variety of flavors, personally I prefer Kubuntu, but if you have a lower end computer- you might want to try Xubuntu.  If you decide you want to try another flavor, you can usually switch without even restaring.  If you just want to try linux and want to keep Windows, Ubuntu has an installer called ‘Wubi‘ that lets you install Ubuntu on an image (a file representing a hard-drive).