Managarm wrote:
I'd mainly be wanting to browse the net, emulate old games, store pictures from the digital camera I'm about to buy.
If this is what you want to do, there's no reason to install Windows XP as any modern Linux distribution will cater for this and more. Any distros mentioned by the other posters will be fine: Fedora Core, Ubuntu, Suse, Mandrake, etc. If you just want to give Linux a quick "test drive", download an ISO of Knoppix as this'll boot straight from the CD into a nicely configured environment.
The E-UAE Amiga emulator is available for Linux, as are a number of emulators for old computers / consoles / arcade machines, so you should be sorted there.
Firefox's Linux version differs little from its Windows counterpart, as does the Thunderbird email client, so your web browsing needs will be covered.
OpenOffice.org is a free fully featured office-type suite (word processor, spreadsheet, etc) and that'll cater for the main productivity-type tasks.
IMHO, the only reason for a home user to install Windows XP is to either run the latest games or if there's a specific requirement to run an application that's XP-specific where a reasonable alternative doesn't exist for Linux.
cv643d wrote:
Its very much like Amiga after all. Applications multitask and you can fire up a prompt just like Cli in Workbench.
Hmm... Windows XP unfortunately still shows MS-DOS roots - the CLI is woefully inadequate when you compare it to an AmigaDOS shell. The whole notion of fixed drive letters is soooo 1981! :-)
Multitasking works well enough in XP most of the time, I'll give it that. But IMO, it's less efficient with resources than Linux on the same hardware.
cv643d wrote:
Better yet every web page you will want to view will look great because you can run Internet Explorer which is the de facto standard for web pages if you look at browser standards.
Err? Cough! Internet Explorer actually breaks a number of web standards and is not fully compliant. Granted, IE does display web pages as the designers intended, but this is only because those designers have to botch the standards to work around IE's non-compliance.
IE is one of the biggest security risks you can install on a PC if you leave it in its default configuration. If you use Windows, junk IE... Mine is relegated to performing Windows Update tasks and nothing else.
Anyway... all of this is just my 2c worth, I'm sure others will disagree!
- Ali
