[CatOwner]

Getting tired of the forced pushing of the Windows 10 upgrade. Just stop it, Microsoft. I wish I knew enough to know whether I could switch over to Linux.

[ctdonath2]

“I wish I knew enough to know whether I could switch over to Linux.”

If you don’t know, you can’t.
Not kidding.

[dayglored]

> I wish I knew enough to know whether I could switch over to Linux.

Couple of easy ways to tell.

If you use your Windows computer for web browsing, online banking and shopping, web-based email, Firefox and Thunderbird, Chrome, Facebook, and many similar activities, chances are very good you could use Linux with essentially no changes, since all those programs are available for Linux just like on Windows.

If you use Office programs (Word, Excel, PowerPoint), the Microsoft versions are not available for Linux, but nearly-100% compatible free versions -are- available.

If you use Outlook for email, and you -have- to use Outlook for work reasons, you're probably stuck with Windows. Outlook is not available for Linux and the "compatible" free programs are good but not close enough for some important functions.

If you run application programs or games that are only available for Windows, well that's pretty obvious...

[adorno]

I wish I knew enough to know whether I could switch over to Linux.

I knew enough to switch over to Linux. It's not that difficult In fact, it's simple.

But, almost as soon as I started using Linux, I gave up, and luckily, I still had Windows running on my main partition, and I then uninstalled Linux. Linux is a fine OS, but not form most regular PC users.

But, why the fear of upgrading to Windows 10? Don't believe the FUD. It's better than Windows 7 and better than Windows 8/8.1, and faster too.

[Dalberg-Acton]

Do you know how to shrink your Windows partition?

[markomalley]

I wish I knew enough to know whether I could switch over to Linux.

I suggest you try a little Windows application called Linux Live USB Creator (or LiLi for short). It allows you to install what's known as a "live" Linux distribution on a USB stick. Then you can boot your computer with that USB stick and try the distribution out to see how well it will actually work on your machine. The nice thing is that you can try out any number of distributions until you find the one you like.

There are any number of ways Linux is bundled together into distribution packages (or "distributions" for short). Here is a site (Distrowatch) where you can read about different Linux OS's and download the ISO's and burn them to a disk for testing and installing.

(For me, the best one for my desktop machine is Linux Mint -- link -- and the best one for my old eeePC netbook is Peppermint. But that doesn't mean there's one that would work for you better)

One other nice feature with Linux, you can install the OS along-side your existing Windows installation, creating a "dual boot" machine. You are asked, whenever you boot up your machine, which OS you would like to boot up. I did that for several years, and would alternatively go between Windows one of several Linux distros. The last install I did, I didn't waste my time any longer with Windoze.

The other posters are somewhat correct in that there are Windows apps that won't work under Linux. Linux has a system called Wine that allows a lot of Windows apps to run (I am able to run MS Word 2007 and MS Excel 2007 using Wine, for example)...but that is not 100%. There are usually alternatives out there that vary from almost as good to even better, but there is a learning curve to figure out the Linux equivalents.

But you can give it a shot using a Live distribution (using LiLi as I described above) and see if it would work for you.