Hiya all…
Just after opinions, am I mad to change from XP to Linux - eg Red Hat or some other variant?
I have absolutely no experience with Linux, but would like to try it out, if there is a easy to install, GUI style one out there…
just for info, I have a P4 1.6, 256Mb DDR RAM, 64Mb Geforce3ti, 40Gb HDD and onboard sound.
I suppose I really want to know if I can play games like Neverwinter Nights on Linux - seeing as I’m not really a twitch gamer and prefer either turn based or real time strategy…
There’s simply going to MUCH fewer games for LINUX, since the market is so much smaller. That’s going to include turn based and RTS games. I have no idea if Neverwinter Nights has been ported to LINUX or not. I’d bet ‘no’.
I’ve installed Red Hat LINUX several times, and the installation is VERY easy. Nice GUIs installed with it too, Gnome and KDE.
Perhaps you should look into making a dual-boot system with XP and LINUX. I looked into it recently, and the biggest obstacle I had was that I needed to reduce the size of my XP partition. Red Hat comes with a utility to do exactly that, but it doesn’s support NTFS type partitions, which I have. To continue, I would have had to purchase ‘Partition Magic’, and since I didn’t want to spend any money on the project I gave up. I already have LINUX on another machine, if I want to play with that.
I’d also say dual-boot, rather than abandon Windows. There’s simply lots of things that you still can’t do on Linux. The NTFS bit is a bummer.
I don’t know about the free-download stuff, but the retail packages usually install something that looks and works very much like Windows by default-- they’re aimed at new users, and at least one GUI and all the services install and come up automatically.
~
The newest version of WINE now supports Warcraft III, Diablo II and Civilization III, so you won’t be totally starved for gaming. However, as with all emulators you’re going to take a performance hit running a program outside its native OS.