[brownsfan]

“Has that changed? If I had an old PC, I might give it another look. But my Windows 7 machines run well, and I can’t see a reason for changing.”

Very much. You can make a bootable cd of ubuntu, fire it up, see if you like it. It won’t touch your hard drive. Then, you can install it if you like it.

An even more fun and painless option is to get VirtualBox and install the distribution of your choice in a virtual machine.

[Dead Corpse]

VBox works great on a Win 7 machine. I’ve been using it to go through a bunch of Linux distros and seeing how far I can tweak them before they break.

Even worked well for a Win 8 test virtual machine. I was surprised it ran so well. I still hate the new interface in 8, but it ran really smoothly.

[4mer Liberal]

I setup VB on my Ubuntu box and had XP, Puppy, Watt OS and android going all at once. It was a lot of fun.

I bought a new Win 7-equipped laptop and it wouldn't play nice with Mint because it had four primary partitions, so I nuked Win 7 and installed 64-bit Mint 12...It screams.