I use Linux and Windows XP daily in dual boot, standalone and server configurations so I guess I'm quite used to them all :-D however for getting windows and linux to dual boot this is an excelletn guide and the one I followed the first time:
How-tp dual boot XP and LinuxSo that'll make your life much easier. I haven't encountered any serious issues with the 64-bit 7.10 version of Ubuntu that I use for the dual boot machine beyond getting flash to work and one audio library for development (programming) that was closed source and only available in 32-bit flavour :/
As for games, no I don't game much on my Linux box except for UT2004 which gets a 5% to 20% framerate improvement under Linux :-D
Windows XP will certainly do for another 5 years or so, at least until Microsoft stop supporting it for businesses. So far I've found every version of Vista to be a complete pig to get used too. Far worse than my initial switch to Linux a few years ago and that was pretty bad.
I don't know what the future of Windos is, but I'm pretty sure that I'll be using some version of it on one of my machines. The rest will be running Linux.
There are games for Linux as well though, they just tend not to be that well known or the market leaders. With the exceptions being the Quake and Unreal Tournament series of games. After that you'll have to investigate something like the WINE project or Cedega (
which is a subscription service but supports a lot of windows games under linux).
Theres also a lot of open source games for Linux and absolutely every emulated games system can be found for it :-)
So, I think people are slowly switching away from Windows, not in truly useful numbers but in drips and drabs they're getting the idea that they can get a whole OS for free if they really want it.. and that is a competitive price point
Andy
