If you use RedHat 6.x distributions, the installation process is straightforward. You just sit and watch it recognise your hardware. If you have unusual hardware - or something which is new since RedHat 6.x came out - then you have to knife and fork it a bit. The old problem with soundcards and scanners which gave Linux a bad name as being unfriendly have gone in 6.x (except that you still have to enter esdctl off as a command-line prompt before using sound).
The only application I have *not* found, and that I want to use, is voice recognition software. I still have to go back into Windows for that. Many of the applications you need every day come as part of the distribution. Most others are free downloads off the net. The user interface for most of them is identical to, or very similar to, the Windows product of the same name; it's generally better to run XYZ for Linux than to try and run XYZ for Windows under WINE or one of the other Windows emulatorsas these rarely support direct video calls, which are increasingly common in modern software.
The main reasons I migrated from Windows to Linux are cost and uncrashability. Your only costs with Linux are a book to understand how to drive it (say £ 20), and the CD (£2.50) with the distribution on it. I chose to spend twenty odd quid on StarOffice 5.2 to get the manual - I use StarOffice a lot - but like all Linux s/w it is also available as a free download. StarOffice does everything Office2000 does, and is more compatible with Office2000 files than Office2000 is. No, that's not a typo; Office2000 has a bug which means that there are problems reading files that people e-mail you. This bug does not exist in StarOffice.
The only way to make Linux crash is to pull the plug out of the wall. When you turn the PC back on again, it uncrashes itself. This takes about five minutes.
Individual programs can and do crash. You then kill them. No Blue Screens of Death! Generally, if a program crashes, I find another one on the net which does the same job, download that, and delete the one that crashed; I now very rarely have program crashes either, except with games which I've downloaded - many of these are quite poorly written. But, hell, they're free, and a lot of them are quite fun. (There is about the same variety of game under Linux as under Windows).
A popular Browser, Netscape Communicator, is crashy for version 4.5, which unfortunately is the version on the RedHat disk. Download 4.7.x as soon as you have Linux up and running, or use the browser in StarOffice (very slick).
Linux does not get viruses (neither do Mac's). Viruses are a uniquely Windows disease. Nuking doesn't work either.
A very common setup is to have Linux and one or more flavours of windows on a PC. Linux comes with a utility called LILO to allow you to select which operating system to use when you boot up.
Powerquest's PartitionMagic is the utility I use for splitting up the hard drives into different partitions; Linux comes with a utility to do this, but it's not wonderful. PartitionMagic is. However, it costs money. Not a lot, though. System Commander does the same job and is also cheap.
Because most of the internet is written in Linux, many sites are read quicker if you are using Linux than if you are using Windows.
The only downside to Linux is that the default setup leaves your PC wide open to probing, as it is assumed that you will want to set up an APACHE webserver. It's a good idea to shut down all those open ports *before* you log onto the net for the first time!
Oh, and if you put linux on a laptop, it gets through batteries quicker because it accesses the hard-drive more often.
You can use Linux without typing a command-line ever, just by setting the user interface to Windows95, (fvwm95); it's very windows-like then, i.e., slow, limited, and ugly. Other interfaces are available to make Linux look like a Mac,a NeXT computer, and Alpha, etc. Most people start with fvwm95 and then find another one which is more functional and uses all three mouse buttons as their confidence with Linux grows. There are only two commands you might need, esdctl off (see above) and mount -t iso9660 /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom (phew!) to make the cd drive work. A lot of applications turn the cd on for you automatically, so the latter one is rarely necessary now.
Where command-line prompts come in useful is in doing things which aren't possible under Windows. For example, Windows ignores the existence of Linux entirely. But Linux allows you to access your windows file system, and effectively run windows remotely. This is useful if you suspect a virus; shut down windows, and then read the suspect file using StarOffice under Linux. Then you can read the attachment with the evil macro or whatever without it infecting your PC. Also, you can write macros ("shell scripts" in Unix-speak); if you can remember "batch files" in DOS, these are essentially the same thing. Very useful, and disabled in Windows.
Some of the games are quite good, and all of them are free. Oh, and yes, there is a Flight Simulator!
