Sick of windows

[ShiFty268]

Hello there im sick of windows! Im sick of viruses and alot of sh!* that comes along with it. I have tryed linux before "fedora core4" i installed it and got it up and running and installed a coupe simple programs. I found it very hard to use and didn't have the patience to continue to use it compared with the east of win xp. What im after is a linux distribution that is easy to use and will be able to run all sorts of windows programs. Can someone please help me here?

[birdman]

You should try lots of distributions to see which suits you best. I know Xandros 3 was designed to be a an easy intro to Linux for Windows users but I don't know much else about it.

To run windows apps in any distribution you will need to use wine:

Wine HQ

It is an implementation of the windows API for linux but doesn't support everything as you would imagine so try it out with your programs to make sure you are happy before you switch.

[netstrider]

Yes, I also heard that Xandros is good and from the screenshots it looks pretty much like WinXP just better. If you can get hold of the new "Linux Magazine" from thins month (May) then you get Xandros 4 and a free 1 year subscription (yes Xandros costs money), else the easiest way would be to use either Ubuntu or Kubuntu...Same thing, different GUI's.

[Roxoff]

The place to look is: DistroWatch.

There are lots of windows-ish distros such as Linspire/Freespire, PCLinuxOS, and others. These are a backward step in my opinion, 'cos they dont really set you free from Windows, they just replicate windows on Linux.

Among the popular distros of the moment Ubuntu (which is based on Debian), PCLinuxOS, Fedora (which is closely tied to RedHat's commercial Linux), Mepis, Debian itself, and SuSE (which is provided by Novel and hence is closely tied with Microsoft ).

Take your pick, either go for one of the Windows-like distros to feel comfy or break out and go for one of the big distros like Ubuntu, Fedora or SuSE which have their own community forums and this forum here where you can get help when there are things you dont understand (and there'll be a few of those, believe me). Try others too, 'cos they're mostly free to download and install with no licensing hassles.