I have finally made the leap from Microsoft to Linux on my home PC. It was surprisingly painless, and I am absolutely delighted at the results. From what I've seen so far, there is no reason why anyone should ever buy Windows again (except perhaps for that little global monopoly thing).
It's wonderful to think about all the good people who have freely contributed so much effort to build a competitive, user-friendly Operating System that is totally FREE. Indeed, it restores my faith in mankind!
In my case, I was moving from Windows XP Pro to Ubuntu Linux, which was available on the cover DVD of last month's APC magazine. Despite a distinct lack of interest in Vista, there is talk of Windows XP being phased out by the end of this year. So what are you waiting for? Ubuntu is the most user-friendly Linux distribution available and (as I mentioned earlier) it is totally FREE!
I had a few problems extracting files from the APC DVD onto a boot CD, but I managed to get a good Ubuntu boot CD from a friend. A Ubuntu boot CD let's you get familiar with Ubuntu, then you can either replace Windows (yay!) or just keep running Linux (slowly) from the CD. It's also possible to download the boot CD files, but it's a BIG download.
Check out the Ubuntu website for more info.
