hehehe, I was laughing at my post from last night. I'd had a few beers, so excuse the lack of usefull information
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Right, first of ricardo I'll try and explain the pros on cons of linux...
Linux is still in my humble opinion a long way behind windows due to a lack of good applications... Web development stuff like Dreamweaver just don't really exist... but with wine you can run it. hell you can even run internet explorer on there if you want to with wine. but, depending on your experience with linux you may or may not get stuff running... as I said in the other post, it takes a lot of pissing around to get an app working in a lot of cases.
The main benefits of linux are really down to speed. it will take the average joe a fair amount of time to get used to configuring Linux via the shell (Like MSDos or AmigaDos), but once you have got it sorted you'll be laughing
. one of the hardest things to configure is the Linux kernel... the amount of hours/days/weeks I tore my hair out tweaking the kernel to get it as efficient as possible and stripping out the stuff I would never use was frustrating to put it mildly
... but it is a "Geeks" OS and a lot of the hardcore fans will run it shell only (no GUI front end like Gnome or KDE at all).
(1) For your first venture into Linux I would recomend something like Mandrake 9.1 (avoid 9.2 like the plague... it is a step backwards) or some flavour of Redhat as it is well supported. These 2 are probably the easiest for someone new to learn with.
(2) Don't make the mistake of thinking that linux will replace windows... it has it's shortfalls. Windows for ease of use wins hands down EVERY time.
(3) Linux is excellent if you are a web developer or programmer. they have excellent server sortware. Damn usefull as you can locally test your websites before deploying them elsewhere.
(4) Linux doesn't have the driverbase of windows. so, don't expect you brand new singing and dancing GFX card to work out of the box... but on the whole, the drivers do appear very quicky
. Monitor support is another issue. it is easy to destroy a monitor just by configuring X11 wrong
right, that'll do for now... I hope I haven't put you off though. it is worth trying, it is kinda fun like the amiga was and thats why I like linux. it's just something different
I don't know if any other of the linux users of PB are reading this, or perhaps Fred himself. I don't own PB yet, but it is the next thing on my list... Can exe's created with PB run 100% shell only (And i obviously mean as long as no GUI commands are used.). Just curious
