The New Kid Needs Advice!

[Mnemonica]

First and foremost! I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing, so please bear with me... I apologize upfront for my lack of knowledge and lack of use of proper terminology.

With that out of the way... Hey there! Thanks for stopping by. ^_^ Here's the deal, I'm currently running WinXP Home Edition on a desktop PC. It's a Dell Dimension 2350 and I haven't done anything with the hardware due to a lack of funds. I'm looking to get into Linux for the following reasons: I agree completely with the idea of open source and think that the whole concept is awesome. I of course love the fact that it's much, much cheaper than big corporate OS's (Read Microsoft and Mac). And most importantly I like having complete control over my machine.

That said, I'm a seventeen year old male about to go off to college. I should be getting a laptop soon (probably also from Dell), and since as far as I understand most Linux distro's are able to read and use the .doc format, I don't see why I couldn't use a form of Linux on my laptop as well as my desktop. I know that it's difficult to learn at first, but I'm willing to give it a try and go through hell if I have to to get it to work on at least my desktop.

Now the fun stuff. I have no idea how any of this works, or how to figure out with distribution I should choose. My most prominent question besides which distro I need is whether or not I can transfer all of my files (Many music files, a lot of text files, some games) from XP to whichever distro I end up using. I've read some stuff, but from what I gather I really need to be able to give input to a person that already knows what they're doing so that they can help me out.

So here's some general info about me. I use the GIMP 2.0 and photoshop elements frequently (almost every day), and use a digital art pad for most paintings. I own an iPod and use iTunes as my media player, I'd like to keep it that way unless there is a no-hassle alternative to iTunes that works in the same way with the iPod (which I highly doubt). Firefox is my main web-browser with Opera as my backup, I use Thunderbird as my mail client. The most graphically demanding game I would like to use would either be The Sims 2, and if I can't work that on Linux than at least Starcraft. I <3 wireless DSL connections and use my Linksys wireless card almost constantly. I know next to nothing about the command line, but I'm willing to learn. And although I'm willing to learn, I would very much like to stick to a GUI based environment. Although the more modifiable the GUI the better, I'd like to be able to change anything I want to any time I want to (thus the willingness to learn). I'm almost positive that what I'm asking for is beyond my reach, but then again it's like I said, I don't know anything about this stuff, so I'm asking.

This post is already getting a bit large for an initial post for a new member... And I don't want to get yelled at for being an annoyance, so I'll leave it here. Any and all help will be greatly appreciated, and if anyone requires any additional information (technical specs, or whatever else) for whatever reason I'll be more than willing to supply them.

Once again, thank you for taking the time to read, and hopefully respond, to my post.

[oz]

Welcome to the forums, Mnemonica

The first thing you should do is click on the link in my signature below and check out the links there. After that, if you should still have questions, make a new thread for them.

Hope you enjoy your time here...

ozar

[Mnemonica]

Damnit. I know I'm new, but I'm sorry for acting the part... Thanks for pointing me to what I should have looked at in the first place.