Tips on moving to Linux?

[gaula92]

Use LUBUNTU: it has the same software base that "mainline" UBUNTU, but it's waaay lighter and has a small memory/cpu footprint.

Try LUBUNTU, you won't regret.

[gaula92]

Perhaps those complaints have some merit: http://linuxfonts.narod.ru/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.the.desktop.current.html. Don't know if it's all true, but it doesn't seem like a bad idea for people to do some research into Linux problems if they want to switch.

If half that was true, my parents (+60 years old), my girlfriend (who is a chemistry student without deep computing knowledge) and most of my friends wouldn't be using GNU/Linux on a daily basis. And they do, with no problems whatsoever.
They produce technical documents, watch videos on youtube, watch downloaded films and series in a perfect smooth way, surf the internet, etc... and they don't need my technical assistance at all once the system is installed.

What's more: they daily have a nice, responsive desktop computing experience, whereas their computers struggled to do anything back in 2009 when they where using Windows Vista instead, before I moved back to my small town and started installing Lubuntu/Debian everywhere.
You can't start to imagine how much quality their computing has earned through using a proper OS like a good GNU/Linux distro.

[gaula92]

Ops system is a p4 without any virtualisation extensions. So it would be very unlikely that a system would run smoothly under vm.

But yes the Linux kernel is light. The stuff that's attached to it is what takes resources. I don't know if it's true still but at one bit you could have a Linux kernel running off a floppy.

It's true as long as:
1) You can still boot floppies
2) You compile a kernel with disabled built-int features (most of the kernel built-in hardware support won't be used in your computer EVER, anyway)
3) You minimize the external modules to these you really need.