i keep hearing from Loads of people Mandrake Linux is amazing.. and is more stable than windows... and doesnt crash... and most of all free...and easy... should i?

I think you should definitely try it out. You'll probably want to install it alongside Windows, which you'll likely go back to now and then for that 'killer' app that you can't find on Linux.

I haven't tried Mandrake myself, but have heard good things. Suse is also meant to be very good and would probably meet your expectations (latest version just coming out is 9.1). That's what I'm looking to use to move from Windows, probably later in the year.

Are you planning on doing a partician of your hard drive and running windows on one and linux on the other?

TheRealFiness said:

I personaly like my xp pro better than anything I've tried.I've heard a million and one stories about how xp crashes etc...Never has happened to me.Win98 on the other hand,I'd rather not even have a computer.

mrbungle said:

I tried doing this with my PC. I partitioned my hard drive and installed Red Hat Linux. Unfortunately, Red Hat didn't like my Ethernet card, so I couldn't access the Internet, and I was unable to boot the machine into Windows. I wound up having to reformat my hard drive and do a clean install of Windows.

crazyhorse said:

I agree, never happened to me either. I love XP, suits me as a normal user just FINE.

It's like what sabaisabai said, some things you just can't do with Linux (yet) so I'd definitely have Win as a backup.

TheRealFiness said:

Free? Who said you pay for XP? [Post edited for legal reasons. --Matt]
[This message was edited Tue Apr 27 14:04:53 2004 by matt]

TheRealFiness said:

Just don't swallow it.