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How painful would it be to try and "operate" a home PC using Linux.

How would I operate a modem dial-up connection, for instance. Would my Netscape browser work? Would cut and paste still work?

Could I still use MS Word and Excel?

It's not painful at all, depending on the distribution you buy and the system you have. I recently bought the Suse professional package for a cost of about $80. Their advertising states 30 minutes to a fully operating system. It took less then 20 minutes on mine.

The package has every kind of program you could want, but it does not run Microsoft products. I am finding that I don't need them because the software included handles everything I need to do and more. What's more, I set it up as a dual boot system, so I can start either Windows or Linux.

I believe I am well on the way toward never having to spend another dollar on MS products. While they are fine and dandy programs, I am tired of having to buy upgrades everytime I turn around.

You aked:
"How painful would it be to try and "operate" a home PC using Linux."

Not painful at all. Really. Everything is pretty much point and drool these days.

"How would I operate a modem dial-up connection, for instance. Would my Netscape browser work? Would cut and paste still work?"

Using a modem is as easy as clicking on an icon and hitting the "dial" button. The first time you will need to put in a phone number, but you'll be typing into a nice friendly graphical app.

Netscape absolutley works. In fact much of the development of the newer versions is done on linux.

Cut and paste work, but differently.

"Could I still use MS Word and Excel?"

Yes and no. You can run Word or Excel under Linux if you set up windows emulation. VMWare is excellent at this (it actually emulates a complete computer, not just windows), and many windows app will run under WINE.

On the other hand, there's no need to. I haven't touched Word or Excel for almost a year. OpenOffice does everything I need, and I trade files back and forth with Word users all the time. I also use it on my windows PC, not just my linux box.

I'd suggest getting a beginner friendly distribution, and if you have an older computer sitting around you don't use much, try it out. Mandrake is an excellent distro, very user friendly and will grow with you.

If you have a broadband connection you can download the entire distro (3 cds), or you can buy it for about $30 at CompUSA/MicroCentre/Best Buy/etc. For the price you get the CDs, a book, and technical support. If you don't want the book or support you can buy the CDs alone from CheapBytes online for $3.99.

If you use the KDE environment you might not realise you're not using windows.

Not painful. Dialing and using Netscape works flawlessly. You shouldn't use Word and Excel because there are free alternatives.

I dual-boot between Windows2K and Linux.

Many people are using "free copies" of Windows products. That will change soon as MS becomes able to verify ownership.

"How painful would it be to try and "operate" a home PC using Linux.How would I operate a modem dial-up connection, for instance. Would my Netscape browser work? Would cut and paste still work? Could I still use MS Word and Excel?"

If you have to ask these questions, you definitely do not want to attempt using Linux as your primary operating system.

How painful would it be to try and "operate" a home PC using Linux.

Well, a couple of weeks ago I installed Mandrake on my laptop because it was painful for me to use the Windows ME that was already installed on it. I don't think Linux is painful at all but that is because I am accustomed to it. It was painful when I first tried it out. The most painful thing about Linux at first is there are so many choices. For example, there are about 10 popular windows managers and you will probably want to try each one out until you find the one you like best. At first I used KDE which is a very nice Windows Manager and Windows Environment. Now, I use WindowMaker which is a very simple, yet a highly configurable Windows Manager.

How would I operate a modem dial-up connection, for instance. Would my Netscape browser work? Would cut and paste still work?

I don't know about installing modems with Linux, but installing my lan connection is very easy and is all completed during installation.

Netscape is available for Linux but most people with Linux would choose Mozilla over Netscape. Netscape is built on Mozilla. In fact, I am using Mozilla right now. Mozilla is a great browser. Two things that make it better than IE for me is the ability to totally disable popup ads and tabbed browsing. Cut and paste works fine for what I use it for. For example I can cut text from my web browser and paste it into my text editor.

Could I still use MS Word and Excel?

Not sure about this. There are Windows emulators that allow you to run Windows programs (I think.). You could try out Open Office. I believe you can read/write in MSWORD format. Not sure if it has excel functionality.

Linux definately is not for everybody. If you want to try it out for the first time, I would recommend doing it on an old PC you have that no longer use. Or have a somebody that is experienced with Linux install it on an empty partition. As far as distributions, I would recommend Redhat or Mandrake.

Check out Lindows.com.

Wal-mart sells a Lindows computer for $300.

How painful would it be to try and "operate" a home PC using Linux.

Go to OpenOffice.org and download OpenOffice 1.0.1 for both Linux and Windows. Familiarize yourself with OpenOffice for Windows then either buy RedHat 8 or download the cd images from a mirror. The standard edition is only $40 from redhat.com. Go for RedHat over Mandrake. IMO it's a lot harder to break than Mandrake and it's more polished now than Mandrake. The last Mandrake I used was 8.2. I've been using Linux since RedHat 6.0 and I would recommend RedHat 8 because it tends to be more forgiving than Mandrake. Heh, that's one of the reasons why Mandrake may have 30% of the desktop Linux market but only like .5% of the server market whereas RedHat has IIRC the majority of the Linux server market now.