I Recently built a new comp but i cant decide what operating system to use.I was leaning towards linux because of the fact that it is free and i have always wanted to play with other than windows.Could anyone with some experience of diffirent op systems please tell me what they believe to be better.I am also into online games (Counter strike,BF1942,Americas Army,Gunz online) and am wondering if the majority are compatible.

Windows and Linux are completely different OS's.

You won't be able to simply throw your game CD/DVDs in your drive and install them on Linux. It simply won't work. Not without specialist 3rd party software anyway. Im guessing from the level of experience you seem to show in your first post that you probably wouldnt want to dabble with anything like that.

Why dont you simply create a dual boot system? Install Windows to one partition, then simply tell whatever Linux distro you go for to create its own partition on your hard drive. At boot up, you will be given an option of what OS you want to boot into. 99% of the time, niether OS will interfere with the other or cause any problems, although i do suggest you read up on dual boot systems first. They are the best of both worlds.

Can we have the specs of this machine also please. That would greatly assist any future help.

Also, i seriously recommend you take the pathetic "Any Kind PPL Please Add To My Rep" out of your sig immediately.

REP IS NOT GIVEN AWAY, IT IS EARNED.

if you want to game online without windows, there's wine, winex (or xwine - still can't remember). Look them up on Yahoo or google or something. Wine does take a fair amount of programming to make everything work the way you want to.

WineX is now known as Cedega and requires a 5$ a month subscription fee. I would go with dual boot until you know LInux is what you want. Or just start off with a live CD(many of which include the option to install) and run from that until you get a little experiance.


Some good LiveCD distributions

Slax
Knoppix
Mepis

User friendly Distros

Ubuntu
Vector LInux
Fedora

Check out distrowatch.com for some info.

Mandrake is another user-friendly distro for beginners and they have a Live CD as well called Mandrake Move.
My favorites so far have been Slackware (both Live CD and regular), Red Hat, Knoppix, and Debian.
It is not an OS for those with little patience though as it WILL take time to get set up properly and/or the way you want it. But if you have the patience and the desire to learn, I would start out with a dual-boot configuration until you learn more about Linux.

thanks for all the help ppl
appreciate it

Stitch
www.neoart.co.uk

Also, in my experience at least, Red Hat 9 (now known as Fedora for home use) had the least amount of trouble recognizing all my various hardware including SCSI cards. The SCSI adapters were giving me fits trying to load Slackware so I went back to RH9.