Still reluctant to start on Linux? Scott Morris has written a book, “The Easiest Linux Guide You’ll Ever Read- an Introduction to Linux for Windows Users”, which you can get free for the download (in PDF format) that will help you get a gentle and informed start in Linux including how to dual boot with Windows. Here’s a couple of excerpts from the book to whet your appetite. When you are done with them just go and get the whole thing and read it. What do you have to lose? Free, as they say, is a very good price. The book is available here.

Scott Morris began using computers over 20 years ago, at the age of 10. He has used 25 different versions of 5 different operating systems over this time period. Of those many operating systems, he has experience using MS-DOS, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Mac OS 9.x – X. He has enjoyed using many different distributions of Linux, including Mandrake, Red Hat, Gentoo,Fedora Core, Debian, and SUSE.

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Myth #2 : Linux has a very limited selection of software.
There is definitely a lot of software available for Windows. In reality, there is a great overabundance. Linux provides a narrower selection of higher-quality programs. Let’s talk about email programs, for example. On Windows, I have tried around 60 different email programs. Of those, about six are mainstream, well-supported, widely used applications (Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora,
Thunderbird, Pegasus, and The Bat). It makes sense that if a great number of people are using a program that it will probably be around for a long time. Not only that, but there are more people who you can ask for help. I recommend using such types of programs wherever possible. For Windows, there are about five mainstream email programs. On Linux, there are also a handful of them, such as Thunderbird, KMail, Balsa, Mozilla Mail, Opera, and Evolution. On average, the number of available Windows programs is overkill several times over. With Linux, you still have a nice handful of choices without having to sort through an ocean of options. There are fewer applications available on Linux. That said, the quality of the good ones is very easily just as good as, in many cases better than, what you find on Windows. This is true especially in recent years, as some applications have reached industrial-strength, enterprise-ready stages of development. Many such applications are employed in full-time use at real companies throughout the world. In the case of email, I recommend using Thunderbird. I will introduce this program along with some other great software later in this book.