I own a mac, and it's great for everything I want to do and I'm glad that I switched from windows. I do web design, photo editing, video editing and am going to start doing some animation and I find that it handles everything that I want to do very well. I have found, in my experiences, that it has better quality of programs and is more intuitive to use than windows. It also has the benefit of greater security ( I know some people doubt this and say that it can still be vulnerable to a trojan horse, but these are still rare) which I find to be great as I don't have an anti-virus taking up my computers resources. It's a lot of little things that you find when you use a mac that will make you happy. Although due to Vista copying a lot of features from Tiger, a lot of these may not be so new if you've already used vista.

I started to work with Linux many years ago, when the most important distro out there was RedHat 4.2. I really never liked it, but it made me feel curious about the existence of alternatives. Slackware was an old distro then, and I did not find it very attractive. But then I accidentally discovered Debian. And it was truly wonderful.

Debian was not an easy distro to install or to maintain. But it had two things I was looking for: power and flexibility.

Eventually Debian became the biggest distro out there, and it has been taken as a base for building many other distros. Ubuntu among them.

I still think Debian is at the top of the hill of the Linux distros. But I cannot ignore many of its derivatives as terrific choices for those who are starting to migrate from other platforms. Ubuntu is a wonderful example of development. It is easy to install, to update, to upgrade and to maintain. It has free and good quality support. It hides most of the complexity of the Linux world to the beginner, but it does not restrict the full power of this OS to the initiated.

Reading the posts in this thread I realize that for many people it is still very difficult to think in Linux as a serious production environment. Maybe because their favorite applications have not been ported to Linux. Maybe because their hardware is not well supported. Or perhaps just because they have been tied to other OSs for too long. That is normal, because migration is a process that takes some time.

Although Linux is not for everybody, I think there are many people out there that could use it for their regular computer needs. It's only matter of trying. Live distros are good for this.

And here comes Ubuntu again, that has reciently released a new version (8.04 LTS).

Best regards,

-L.

I decided to switch from Windows to Linux when my computer kept getting too many viruses and spyware. I had to keep re-installing windows to get rid of them all, and the process starts over. At one point my computer just switched off 5 seconds after booting up, so I get so tired of windows I decided to switch to Linux. I had no issues with it, apart from the fact it couldnt run the everyday programs I needed it to. I use my trap17 account to run a forum about a particular software, which was not available on Linux. I tried to get it working but it proved impossible to get it working, so I had to switch back to windows. Someone suggested to me I have two computers: One for internet use only and using Linux, the other for offline use only using Windows.