One of my friends at college has this on his laptop, and I like it a lot. It looks clean, moves fast, just something all around nice about it. He's got the disk and had been urging me to switch to it all quarter, but I was wary. I really don't know anything about computers besides how to use the internets, honestly. I'm currently running Windows Vista on my laptop (kinda clunky). Obviously I'd want to keep all my files (10K+ mp3's). How simple or complicated of a procedure would this be? Also, anyone else who uses Linux, gimme your professional opinion.

Definitely try it. I haven't used Ubuntu, but I've heard it's great for beginners. You could keep your stuff if you partition your hard drive and do a dual boot. The typical setup is to have your Windows installation on a relatively small NTFS system, your Linux on an Ext3 system, and the rest something neutral, like Fat32. Problem with Fat32 though is it can only be like 40 gigs, so you have to decide which operating system you'll be using more beforehand. I have something like a 140gig NTFS partition, but I never use Windows, so sometimes I have to switch to Windows just to move files over (LInux can read but not write to NTFS).

Most college have linux user groups that'll hold installfests or whatever, they might be able to help set it up...

Yeah, see, I have no idea what any of that meant. It's cool, though. My friend's older brother is a software developer or something, and he's down at our school relatively frequently. I think I'll just ask him about it next time.

My wife has ubuntu on her desktop and she's by no means a nerd. She finds it very suitable for everyday uses (word processor, spreadsheet, listening to mp3, browsing the web). The only trouble is with OCR and certain specific win-developped apps (professional apps) but it really is suitable for everything else.
I myself use mandriva 2008 on my desktop and I have no trouble with it.
No more antivirus/spyware soft that pump your Ram, it's really cool !

I have Ubuntu on one of my desktop machines. It's fantastic, and I recommend it

Yeah, I mean, like I said, I've seen it on my buddy's computer, messed around, and I like it a lot. I'd run and download it right now, if only I knew how to transfer all my music files (really....that's all I care about).

Sundevil, you wanna just come over some time this week?

Ok, I'm doing this tonight. All my shit is backed up on my external, we're going full conversion.

Well, here we are. Posting with Ubuntu, guys.

It's easy enough to set up, no? I've never tried Ubuntu.. Just on a virtual machine, but the VM wouldn't run it (it ran Fedora and Gentoo fine... go figure). But from what I hear, it's pretty user-friendly right out of the box.

Let us know.

Yeah, real easy to set up. Downloaded it from the website, burned it to a CD, restarted the comp with the CD in, clicked install, and it pretty much worked itself out from there. My buddy who's got it helped me from some config stuff, but it probably wasn't anything I couldn't have figured out myself. Currently importing all my shit from my external back onto the computer itself.

Honestly, I love it. Bye-bye, Vista.

Yeah, it'll be alot faster than Vista...

When you've started to find your way around is when it really starts to get fun. You can play around with other desktop environments and window managers and basically make it look however you want it to look.

Yeah right now I've got the cube going for my workspaces. Really cool. I still need to fool around with the graphics options, too. there seems to be a lot of cool shit.

Do you happen to know anything about Wine, SD? I'm looking into it mainly because I'd still like to be able to use Exact Audio Copy for ripping my CD's, possibly Winamp too. Winamp I don't care much about, as Rhythmbox seems to be a perfectly suitable music player, but I had EAC configured exactly how I wanted for ripping CD's, and all ubuntu's got on it right now is this Sound Juicer thing, which doesn't seem to be quite the same.

In order to have wine working on your system, you'll have to enable some extra repositories but it's simple as that :
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Wine

I don't particularly care for Wine. I'm sure it'll work with some software, but it's buggy and complicated to get anything working. It's been a couple years since I've used it, though, so maybe things have changed since then.

Honestly, cdparanoia is just as good as EAC, although I've found some audionazis won't accept anything but EAC's output.

cdparanoia? I'll have to check it out. I'm by no means an audio nazi, but I did like EAC a lot.

biltop has reached a new cool level

Sound Juicer is just a front end for cdparanoia. But you can use it from a shell, and I'd imagine you'd have a more options to work with.

soundjuicer is really user-friendly, if you install lame packages and everything else (flac, ogg and whatsoever), you'll have all the fonctionnalities (or close to) of EAC.

Alright, well I did install the LAME packages. I haven't actually tried to rip anything yet, I was just afraid I was going to be getting some shitty 128 itunes default style action. I guess maybe not. I haven't looked into it much yet, I'll have to.