good

This is great news! I have tried Linux before, and never really saw that it fit any need other than saving a couple hundred dollars in exchange for a more painful setup experience. I have a some old computers at home that do random things like playing MP3s, and the $100 for a Windows XP upgrade looks big compared with just chucking the computer and buying an MP3 player. Upgrading to a newer Linux is looking more and more like the right solution for hand-me-down computers that you want to get off the MS upgrade price treadmill.

Do you have a DVD-rom drive?

An Apple a day.................

I was impressed by Mandrake 8.1 as well. But then, everything I do in school is in one part of the MS Office suite or another, or in the Visual Studio, so I killed the Mandrake partition and went back to 98. I installed 2000 Pro the other day, and have to say that I was just as impressed with that as I was with Mandrake. Install went smooth as silk, the only driver I had to go out and find was the driver for my digital film reader. It already had the required driver for my NIC, and then popped up and reported that it had found an updated driver and wanted to know if I wanted to install.

That, and the system seems to run a lot faster and smoother under 2000 Pro than it did under 98. Originally, it was going to be a temporary experiement in the OS, but I think I'm going to keep it.

thing is, mandrake is the distribution most beset with quality control problems. redhat 7.2, suse 7.3, or even the current caldera (though it's gotten out if the hobbyist distro business) will demonstrate all the ease of use features you mention, plus, pretty much everything works.

dep

Yep, it's getting to be much more of a realistic alternative. The setup and ease of use have come a long way just this year alone -- it just impresses the heck outta me what they've been able to do with the setup and install. If, as mentioned in another response, Red Hat and other distributions have improved this much also, then there's more choices out there than you think.

Yep -- it has a DVD-ROM drive but I haven't gotten around to trying DVD playback yet.

I like Win2K much better than W98... my main desktop machine (1.4G Athlon, 512MB DDR, GeForce3) has Win2K on it and it's worked very well. 98 is okay if you need it for certain games, but that's about it.

Going with Windows is like buying a car with the hood welded shut. You don't have the low level access that you need to keep the system properly tuned, so after a while it just tends to deteriorate.

With Linux, one has the option of getting "under the hood"...and it's simply having the option that intimidates many potential users.

With Linux, one has the option of getting "under the hood"...and it's simply having the option that intimidates many potential users.

It's not so much that having the option is intimidating, it's when you have get under the hood to get it to do something that you need it to do. I don't mind mucking around with the source and re-compiling if I'm doing it for fun on a machine that I can happily reformat and start over with, but I sure wouldn't want to have to do that on a production machine just to get something done. It seems as if the later distributions of Linux are making that a thing of the past; the last thing I played with was Red Hat 7.0 and it took a fair amount of fussing around (and learning) to get an early version of wlan-ng to build clean so that I could get the wireless networking stuff to work, but Mandrake 8.1 set it all up during the install and I never had to leave the couch. :)

Good luck unless you know how to write your own driver.

That's the beauty of a multi-boot system... when I can't get one partition to do what I want, there's always the other until I figure it out.

Try taking a look at Redmond Linux. They are focusing explicitly on making the desktop easy to use (it's built on KDE).

I just received and installed my copy this afternoon; I've never had such a painless installation. (Much less than Red Hat 7.2 KDE, which has a number of broken features -- such as KPackage will neither install nor remove packages....)

I haven't gotten much further than that (it's off to the company Christmas party in a few minutes), but the presentation seems a bit cleaner -- and a LOT cleaner than Win2K. One of the developers of Redmond Linux writes for a local computer glossy, and has focused on easy-to-use GUI issues.

Maybe you just dont know what you are doing?

...and maybe your last name is "Gates"?

That's the beauty of windows software. Load it and use it.

Much less than Red Hat 7.2 KDE, which has a number of broken features -- such as KPackage will neither install nor remove packages.

Not broken here. I downloaded the Opera 6 preview 2 last night in rpm and it installed like a charm. If you want fast web browsing compared to Netscape 6.2 it's the way to go. It's a freebie if you don't mind a small ad bar.

Welcome to the rest of the world.