For us commoners who use the pc for surfing and emailing only, is Linux worth looking into? I've been thru the progression of Win 95, 98FE, and now XP pro. Same goes for various IE editions. I've found Firefox 1.5 to be superior to IE, and really no startling differences in the Win OS's over the years. Cable is not available in my area, so I have crap dialup.
Opinions Welcome.
I would never recommend Linux as a client operating system, I would strongly recommend a swith to Apple if you really feel the need to switch. Yes you have to buy new hardware but why not if you are really looking for a new computer experience. Either make a complete switch to something equal or better, or learn to customize windows, such as wincustomize.com, but you're only asking for a lot of headaches switching to Linux. It is more of a computer scientist type of system, that can't easily run most software or have very good vendor support.
There are several folks on here that don't have a particular axe to grind regarding windows or linux.
For my part, as a strong linux supporter (to let you know my bias right up front), if you're only doing email and websurfing, linux is far superior to windows, as it is generally safer, and you'll not have to deal with such things as spyware/viruses/trojans.
For dialup, I'mn not really sure what it's like, as I haven't owned a modem in years, and at the time, it wasn't point and click. I've heard that it can be pretty straightforward these days if you have a supported modem (i.e., no 'winmodems'). If your modem is an external box, from what I understand, it's fairly trivial, as just about all of those types are well supported.
If you want to see if Linux is for you there are pleany of 'live cd' which means you stick the CD in, boot the computer and play around if you have major issues with hardware or hate the look and feel of Linux just reboot the box, take the CD out, and youre back at windows..
mash here, Westlander...http://www.linspire.com/