I too have recently taken the plunge into Linux. The first thing that struck me was: holy crap, there are
a lot of Linux distributions. So, before doing any research I tried Ubuntu. Mind you, I did not (and still have not) installed Linux, but booted from a live CD; If you want to try several distributions,
live CDs are
definitely the way to go.
The first thing I tried was a folder transfer of ~8GB from an internal hard drive to an external USB drive. Imagine my surprise when it announced it was transferring at 10MB/s, a speed I've never seen in Vista or XP. And imagine my utter astonishment to witness the transfer rate
climb to 13MB/s!! This underscored my feelings that Microsoft has really been dragging their ass on fixing stupid bugs that should have been gone in Win2k simply because of their vast and luxurious PC market share. But I digress...
After trying now five (soon six) distributions (Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Linux Mint, Debian Live, and Fedora), I've come to a few conclusions:
- There is a complete lack of information on the web for skilled Windows users looking to jump ship. Each site totes the biggest benefit of their distribution is that it's free. No sh¡t Sherlock, that's because it uses a Linux kernel and is GPL; tell me something I don't know.
- Having used only Windows my whole life, I was unprepared for the plethora of choices that exist, which is further complicated by my lack of knowledge on these subjects because Windows makes things like the kernel and the desktop environment seem inseparable.
- I prefer GNOME over KDE.
- Most people have no understanding whatsoever of how complicated a personal computer really is, let alone how to use Windows.
So far, Linux Mint has come out on top of every metric I'm using to determine which distribution to install. Pending any further developments (someone suggested I try UNIX...I don't know if I have the patience), it looks like
Linux Mint will win.
It'll be so nice to get away from Windows for a while. Until, that is, I have to use software for which there is no decent Linux counterpart or that
Wine won't run...