I've really done it now...

Well, here goes.

This is the running story of my switch from the Windows operating system to the linux operating system (from now on, I will just say OS.)
I'll start with a little background info.

I'm a first year computer science student at Southern Oregon University. I'm married to an extremely non-technical woman and have a brilliant baby girl. Until very recently, my experience with linux was limited to having some fedora cds that a friend gave me. He even made a partition on my hard drive in which to install a second linux OS, but I was consumed with fear.

A second os? Wouldn't that mess up the Windows os? How does this work? How do I tell it which one to boot? If my Windows programs won't work, what programs will I use? And finally (and most importantly) what does it look like?

I knew I could probably find out all of the technical things I needed on the web, but there was one more consideration...my non-technical wife. If she couldn't check her email or get to her lyric sheets, there would be hell to pay.

So right about now you may be asking yourself, "Why would someone with a perfectly good Windows XP system want to go through the trouble of figuring all of this out?" Well, there are two reasons:
1. I have a deep hatred of everything corporate, and what could be more corporate than Microsoft?
2. I've had trouble with viruses, spyware, etc. It got to the point where I was running a ridiculous number of anti-this-and-that programs, all of which seemed to do nothing, and I had heard that linux was impervious to such attacks.

Finally, after going back to school and meeting a friend that's a computer programmer here in town, I decided I should do it... I should switch the family computer to linux. (Well, all of those reasons combined with the fact that my Windows os had slowed to the point that I couldn't even successfully burn a cd.)

I had no idea what I was getting myself into.