I know I asked it before, but I thought I would ask again as the OS is still as popular as ever.

Are you currently using Linux? And if so what distro and version are you using? What do you think of it compared to the other OSs you have used in the past? And what are you currently using it for?

I've been using Fedora for a few years now and still think it's a great Distro, and I've also used SUSE quite a lot and think that is one of the nicest Distros to use for ease of setup. But as Ubuntu has become very popular lately and is the only distro many seem to be talking about at the moment I thought I would finally give that a go now.

So I'm currently setting up one of my spare PCs ready to install it. The server edition looks good too, being able to install and have a complete LAMP server up and running in 15 minutes sounds impressive and something I could find very useful for testing.

I am going to install the desktop version onto the PC to have a play around, and might then setup the server edition in a virtual machine on my main PC to use an an extra test server.
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I am not using now, but i used for 2 years the Mandrake 10. It was a good Linux, but i used it as user, not to develop, it was only for office tasks, web, mp3.
Today i only have XP, but i am not using it to develop or to do complicated works, so one of this days i will try Ubuntu,i read nice things about it.
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I never tried Mandrake. It it still be developed. These days you mostly only hear about Fedora (and Red Hat), SUSE, Ubuntu and Debian.

Did you know about virtual machines and live discs? You can try Ubuntu on CD as the install disk is also a Live CD, so it will run completely from CD. It is also possible to install Linux on a virtual machine and run it that way. A free virtual machine called Innotek Virtualbox supports Linux installations so you can install and run Linux without needing to setup a real HD or system for it. I've tried Virtualbox with Windows 98 and it works perfectly, so I'm next going to try it with Ubuntu.
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I will try ubuntu to one of this days, i will install on top of windows to have a 2 boot option, just like mandrake did.
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You will need to repartition your HD for that though, which is a bit more hassle. That is why I'm trying it out in a virtual machine so I can install it, test it and then just delete the virtual HD image if I decide not to keep it.
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Well i try the virtual machine before (VMplayer) but the speed is not the same....

When i installed Mandrake some time ago, he creates a new partition for Linux and did something like "pull the win partitions to other side of HD" and rearange them all, but it was very fast to do it. And both mandrake and XP did work fine! I am sure ubuntu will do the same. .... later if i see that ubuntu do everything i need, i remove windows... i only have XP because there is allways 1 application i cant find in linux.... but if i get all in linux (dont need to much these days) i will keep linux only...
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There is also the ability to run a lot of Windows software using WINE and other Linux applications, which also helps remove the need for Windows.

But, I couldn't stop using Windows as it has so much software I need, such as Photoshop and video editing apps, but also as important are the emulators such as MAME and WinUAE, which are not as developed under Linux.
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Otherwise get a copy of Partition Magic which does the partitioning job quite good, without losing content or having to reformat the whole.
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I don't trust partition magic myself. Not since I used a copy a few years ago and it completely messed the HD up. It also seemed extremely slow and sat for a long time appearing to do nothing.

The Linux partition tools are much better as they run without first needing to boot into the OS on the HD, so the whole of the HD is free for it to control and move data around. And as Tiago said, the Linux partition tools are normally very fast.

In fact, compared to Windows everything in Linux is fast! I installed Ubuntu onto a spare PC earlier this evening and from switching the system on I had it all installed and setup, with internet access, all hardware working, and no conflicts in under 20 minutes! Tell me that's possible to do with Windows!

And Microsoft really do need to be shown the latest versions of Linux and how an OS really should behave. I tried to enable the enhanced visual effects in the Ubuntu desktop, but as it was only using the default nVidia drivers from the install CD it didn't have the ability to enable the features... so what did it do? It automatically asked me if it was OK to download the proper driver, I clicked OK, it downloaded it without further issues, installed it and the features were activated. Why can't Windows be that straight forward?
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I have used Debian/Sarge for PPC, and it was OK, but being an OldWorld Mac it was a bit difficult to get going. In fact, I didn't get it working properly at all, partly due to graphics problems, but out of all the distrobutions I tried, Debian is the ones which worked best.

I have a spare partition on my PC's HD so I will see about installing the newer version of Debian, which I forget the name of.

For live CDs, I quite like DSL.
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