I am presently in the market for a new laptop and am very dissatisfied with MS Vista. I have not ruled out Apple but would like to stay with something that I can run my existing MS programs on. Has anyone had any experience with Linux operating system? Can I use my existing program on the system?

I am going to Boston at the weekend and would like to purchase the laptop in that city and bring it back with me, It is cheaper price and far less tax than in Ontario and I don't have to pay duty on it.

Thanks in advance.

Thread for the skybar is this sloyne, just a friendly nudge before the mods probably shift it!

Thread for the skybar is this sloyne, just a friendly nudge before the mods probably shift it! Thanks Chog.

I am presently in the market for a new laptop and am very dissatisfied with MS Vista. I have not ruled out Apple but would like to stay with something that I can run my existing MS programs on. Has anyone had any experience with Linux operating system? Can I use my existing program on the system?

I am going to Boston at the weekend and would like to purchase the laptop in that city and bring it back with me, It is cheaper price and far less tax than in Ontario and I don't have to pay duty on it.

Thanks in advance.

I've ran linux for years, mainly in work though, and usually on servers. You can run quite a few windows programs on Linux using a system called "Wine", but it can be fiddly and I would say it is not really beginners - you may be better off looking for Linux alternatives for the set of programs you use if you're serious about switching. The thing to note is that Linux is very different from Windows and Apple OSX in that its free, and comes in many different flavours, called distributions. It also has a massive catalogue of good quality, free software that be installed completely free of charge. Some people think free of charge = crap, but its not the case with Linux.

here are some equivelants for linux in the Linux Alternatives Project (http://www.linuxalt.com/) or in this table (http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Linux_software_equivalent_to_Windows_software)

Of course, for the basics, Linux comes well stocked. For my normal setups I'd usually use

Thunderbird or kmail instead of MS Outlook (email)
Firefox instead of IE (web)
OpenOffice instead of MS Office
Gimp instead of Paint (its actually miles better than paint! :))
Gaim instead of MSN Messenger
etc...


If you have any specific programs you use let me know and i'll dig up some equivelants.

If i were to pick a Linux distribution, I'd pick UBUNTU which is very popular due to its ease of use. The best place to get help though isn't on a skyscraper forum, you'd be much better going to the fantastic LinuxQuestions forum http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/

hope this helps, linux is a good choice!

If i were to pick a Linux distribution, I'd pick UBUNTU which is very popular due to its ease of use. The best place to get help though isn't on a skyscraper forum, you'd be much better going to the fantastic LinuxQuestions forum http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/ Thanks yoseph, will do.