Many people have asked the question on how to switch from Windows to Linux. It is truly almost as easy as picking up an Ubuntu CD and installing Linux, however I’d like to get into some details on what to expect. Switching from Windows to Linux is easier than you think and is worth a shot.

Flavors of Linux
I’d like to recommend that you try Ubuntu Linux as your first distribution as it seems to be one of the easier flavors of Linux to install. There are other flavors of Linux you can try but may be a bit more complicated when first getting in to Linux.

Slackware linux is one of the first distributions of Linux available. The application installation is mainly source based requiring that application be compiled. There are also slackware binary packages that can be downloaded as well. Slackware uses a text based installer and requires some knowledge of the Linux command line.
Gentoo linux is one of the most advanced versions of Linux letting you start from scratch. You literally compiles your whole Linux operating system from source.

Fendora linux is another fairly easy distribution to use. It also comes with a graphical installer and package manager for installing software.

Applications
Open Office will be your office productivity suit letting you read and write all of Microsoft Office’s formats including Excel, Power Point and Word. One nice feature that is built into Open Office is the ability to save directly to PDF format.

Evolution email is much like Outlook in that you can connect to a Microsoft Exchange server, IMAP mail server and even a POP mail server. You can even check your Gmail.com email using the gmail pop3 setup. The software comes with an email reader, calendar, todo organizer and many of the features Outlook has, without the cost of having to buy Office.

GIMP would is you graphical editor which will let you modify and edit photos as well as let you create logos and other various Graphics. You can read and write the Photoshop format as well as virtually every graphical format out there. The prohowto.net logo was created using the GIMP.

Totem is going to be your media player letting you watch movies and listen to music files. Because of legal issues around the mp3 and mp4 format you’ll need to install support for these after your Ubuntu is installed. The Ubuntu team can not pre-package Ubuntu with DVD playback or MP3/MP4 support. Check out our “How to play DVD’s in Linux” for a tutorial on how to get DVD playback support in Linux.

Firefox comes pre-installed in Ubuntu but using the Synaptic package manager you can install a host of other browsers including Opera and the Chromium ( Google Chrome) browser. Check out our how to on how to install Chromium in Linux.

Pidgeon is the instant messenger program. You can connect to all the popular IM services such as Google Chat, MSN Messenger, and AOL Instant Messenger. For Voice and Video conferencing I recommend installing Skype for Linux which can be downloaded from the Skype website.

Frostwire is a P2P application much like Limewire except there are no advertisements. You can download movies and music just like you can with Kazaa and Limewire.

Gaming
Gaming in Linux has always been a big problem. Many games work in Linux but don’t expect to be able to run every title like you can in Windows. If you do a lot of gaming in Windows you may want to consider dual booting. If you only play the mainstream games such as World of Warcraft, Call of Duty and Star Craft, Cedega.com can bring these games to your Linux operating system without and hitches.

If you’re just a normal computer user, someone that just uses the computer for day to day stuff like surfing the web, looking at family photos, chatting online and playing the popular games, you’ll probably have no issues running Linux.

If you need specialized software such as Quicken, you may want to consider dual booting.

Conclusion
Head on over to Ubuntu to download an ISO image to burn to CD and give it a try. When you come to the drive partition section of installation you can choose to dual boot or wipe your entire drive. I recommend that you back-up and data before running a dual boot setup just be safe.

I hope this helps you in choosing whether to switch over to Linux from Windows.

Note: You don’t have to use Ubuntu on your first try of Linux but I just recommend it because it appears to be the easiest. Please check out Fedora or Debian if you’re totally against using Ubuntu.