Microsoft will stop releasing updates and security patches for windows xp in 2014. You could still use it after then. Since not even Microsoft makes software that works on
Windows xp anymore (Internet Explorer 9) it probably is a good idea to upgrade at some point ^_^;
Quote: and use that software where you can switch PCLinuxOS to xp and vice
versa without having to reboot. I forgot about the name of that software though...
Is that even possible? o.O
As far as I know the only alternative to not rebooting is to use a Virtual Machine like VirtualBox or VMware
AT the moment I use Ubuntu on all my computers but I'm going to change to something else over the summer because
someone laughed at me >.<
Ubuntu is what people who are new to Linux use. I was going to go with Arch Linux but the whole Package signing scandle
kind of put me off. I know it's not as bad as people make out but I am surrounded by amoral computer science
students, if anyone's going to take advantage of that security hole it'll be them >.>
My plan now is to switch to Gentoo and if that fails then Debian is my fallback ^_^V
cheri mentioned the biggest problem with Linux is compatibility with software. In my experience most things worth using
will either work on Wine or have an open source Linux version.
MS word --> libreoffice
itunes --> Rythmbox
mIRC --> xChat
msn --> emesen
ad so on. Its very rare that I actually have to boot up Windows in VirtualBox to run a program. Usually it's just
the odd game or visual novel.
Here's a good vid to compare the superficial differences between Windows and Linux. If you thought Windows 7 if as
good as cool as a computer can get then you're in for a surprise.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xC5uEe5OzNQ&nofeather=True
That's 4 years old aswell.
Other things I like about Linux apart from the Desktop environment giving people who think Windows 7 is cutting edge
technology a heart attack is, no viruses, virtually everything is open source so
if you don't like something you can fix it!, it's free, it boots in under 60 seconds, as an Operating System
it basically never crashes and if an individual program does crash there's an instant kill command, none of that
-this program is not responding please wait 10 minutes- crap you get in Windows.
To be fair though Linux isn't all fun and games.I know I've spent many an hour trying to figure out whow to
get things to work >.<. If you just want a computer that works easily and don't care abut anything else then
stick with Windows ^_^V