Can you convert me?

[nlmorgan09]

There is definitely a learning curve when moving from Windows to Linux, but it's not too bad if you give it some time and you focus on just one issue at a time until you know what you are doing. Nobody here was born knowing how to use Linux, and most of us started out in pretty much the same place that you are starting from. It just takes a while to get some momentum going.

Try to have fun with it!

Have fun with it I will! I am actually making plans to get a new PC this year and want to know all I can before hand so I can go straight to the dual boot when I get it out of the box. Oh to have a system with 6+ GBs of RAM, a network adapter that can use the 'n' network, an HDMI port, a 1+ TB hard drive, sandybridge possibly, and maybe even a blu-ray burner! *drools* I'm easy to please.

[MASONTX]

Welcome to the forum. Distrowatch.com is a good place to research and download distro's. They have a top 100 on the right side of the page, so if you start at the top and download/burn distro's to a rw/cd, you can try different live cd's (works from cd without installing). Most people will find a distro they like in the top 10 to 20 distro's. One caveat, Ubuntu 10.04 is a long term support version, while 11.04 is only supported until Oct 2012, and some people report problems running it on their hardware. I run 10.04, and tried, but didn't like 11.04. The great thing about linux, is that there is choice. There are hundreds of distro's, each tweaked to what their support group thinks is the best combination of features, desktop, and window manager. Try several and decide which one suits you best.

[Tsquad]

Id like to suggest you look into the distro Linux Mint 11. It is much like Ubuntu in functionality but i like the way it looks and runs far better. I tryd Ubuntu 11.04 as well and was not impressed. It was rather slow compared to Mint 11. As you mentioned you had been on youtube, that is a great place to find in depth reviews on all the different distros your thinking of trying out. Im currently dual booting win 7 and mint 11, and i wouldnt have the win 7 partition if the game i play ran on linux >.<

If you give linux a fair chance, im sure you will love it, i know i do. Pluss its something new to play with

[Hyp0tez]

VBox is another way to test new distros,
and if I´d go for a distro,I´d go for the one with most posts that are solved in forums on the Internet
thogh that could make you install 2 things, either a really buggy distro, or a well supported one with a helpful usercommunity
I use Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, RedHat,Suse and a few more

[jayd512]

thogh that could make you install 2 things, either a really buggy distro, or a well supported one with a helpful usercommunity

Very nice!

[cynwulf]

My main concern is can I get Windows programs to run on it like Photoshop CS4? My wife is a photographer so thats a big deal to us.

Something along the lines of this came up recently, if we're talking professional photography here, you will probably be looking at a dual boot or another machine entirely.