There is so much information on the Net for those who are interested in Linux, that I could not hope to even begin to offer basic introductory coverage of relevant resources. My purpose here is only to offer a personal statement on the virtues of attempting to adopt Linux as an operating system for your desktop computer, and to provide a few links of special interest.
Although I am a student of the humanities and not a IT specialist, I have, since January of 2002, been able to successfully shift the major portion of my daily work away from the oppressive Windows OS to Linux. During my first six months I used the Mandrake distribution (now called Mandriva). I then moved over to Red Hat 7.3, subsequently upgrading to versions 8 and 9 of the same distribution. In December of 2003, after some dissatisfaction with Red Hat's approach, I moved to Debian, a totally free distribution of Linux that is developed and maintained by a collaborative community of programmers. It was a bit more difficult to set up, but extremely easy to use once in place.
I was gradually motivated to get away from Microsoft Windows due to my experiences as a web developer. Being forced to deal with Microsoft products at the level of underlying code gradually led me to an awareness of the range of means—both overt and subtle—that company was using in an attempt to stamp out the equivalent of "free speech" in the computer programming environment—trying to force every single user into a world constrained by one value alone: Microsoft profits. My alarm was compounded by the observations readily made from reading the daily papers: the nasty bully tactics that Microsoft has been using for a long time now to force competitors out of business.
Having heard that Linux was hard to use, I was long reluctant to invest time in giving it a try. But I was pushed over the edge by licensing policies associated with the XP upgrades, along the continual fear of Internet-borne viruses which inhabit Microsoft products.
Having become completely Microsoft-dependent for many years, I was not able to kick the habit cold turkey. Thus, I installed Linux on my desktop in a dual-boot setup (very easy to do with the most recent editions of Linux), and simply began to do my e-mail in Linux. What a relief this was! Since then, I have gradually branched into using Linux applications for other aspects of my work (I will be happy to share my recommendations on these applications with anyone interested), to the extent that I now spend most of my working time in Linux, rather than Windows.
There is indeed a learning curve in the process of learning Linux, but this is not that much different from the sort of experience Mac users have when trying to switch to Windows, or vice versa. You can basically do everything you need in Linux, although there is definitely more responsibility placed on the user to get things set up and working correctly—part of the price of freedom.
A further reason for my interest in Linux in particular, and Open Source software in general, lies in my occupation as an intellectual historian. The philosophical idealism, coupled with the practical successes that are being demonstrated by Free Software and Open Source (which I follow Lawrence Lessig in labeling together for convenience with the rubric "open code") movements deserve attention, I believe, as some of the most important intellectual trends of our generation. Given the pervasive reach of digital technology, it is hard to imagine that these trends will not bring some amount of influence to bear on the nature of scientific research as we know it.
Simply put, the open code model is well suited to the ideal of the pure pursuit of scientific knowledge and intellectual freedom, while the proprietary software model, the evils of which are most clearly demonstrated in the business practices of Microsoft Corp., represent the exact antithesis of these pure ideals (hence the resemblance of Microsoft company rhetoric to the Orwellian newspeak used by our government officials). In this way, the choice of Linux as an operating system comes to take on an ethical significance. Simply put, proprietary software that is built with the control mechanisms decided by Microsoft is incompatible with ideals of true scientific research, and thus does not belong on the desktops of academics. Please consider this.