Originally Posted by CrucialHoax

Reliable?

That depends on your hardware. If all your devices are common and widely supported then you should be fine. If not....

Fast?

It can be.

Easy to use?

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. As frostmourne mentioned, you will have to become very familiar with the terminal.

Vista is currently far easier to use than any Linux distro.

If you have the HDD space, dual boot. It can sometimes be a pain to setup, but once it's sorted multi-booting works quite well.

In my opinion, if you are still having problems learning Vista then you will have a lot of problems learning Ubuntu.
Ive used it quite a bit before, but it can be quite a learning curve if you have never used Linux before.

There are programs you can add to linux to give it a windows feel. Most distributions come with at least one. KDE is one of them.

You don't have to use a text only terminal interface if you don't want to.

I had thrice installed Ubuntu alongside Vista on my laptop. Only to uninstall each time a short while later. Each time I decided that I want to get more familiar with Linux, each time not getting around to it and freeing up the disk space it was using.

All in all, installation and setup can actually be very easy (I suggest wubi, it installs Ubuntu within Windows and can be removed from within Windows like any other program!!!)

As far as the actual experience itself, I can't tell you. I had maybe used Linux hands-on for no more than a few hours. I'm very familiar with the Windows environment, and as is well known to be Linux's biggest "conversion" problem is the fact that it's simply not the same environment that everyone is used to. That's probably why I never got around to it. Plus, I don't complain about Windows. Ever.

If you are not too familiar with either environment, there are lots of good reasons to pick any one of the two. And I'm sure a quick Google search will bring up loads of reading material as to what the practical differences are.

I'm just going to say that there are lots of Microsoft haters out there, and lots of Linux haters. But in my opinion that doesn't mean that either is bad. I believe they are both good, and for me personally it was only a matter of familiarity, not necessarily of quality.

Originally Posted by CrucialHoax

Wubi is sweet, I'm going to install linux now and try it out. Thanks so much for the idea. And honestly, I don't think I've ever complained about windows. I love windows, I'm just curious thats all I have nothing against either OS I just want to try and learn some new things. Thanks again for the Wubi link. So why is it that you have to use the terminal so often when it has a GUI? I don't see the neccessarity.

Terminals are very powerful tools, no matter the operating system. Perhaps the Windows GUI has really developed enough over the years to suffice, and completely replaced the terminal for the average user. But I too understand that at least a basic understanding of the terminal is expected of most Linux users. Apparently it's quite comfortable (you can install any program by typing a simple command and the name of the program following).

Oh, I just remembered, if you do uninstall Linux using wubi, perhaps it's best you make sure to have a copy of a Windows Recovery Disc just in case something goes wrong with the bootloader (not too big a deal), but a recovery disc is a good thing to have no matter what. (I don't remember which of the three installations gave me trouble with the bootloader, but I guess better safe than sorry).