Linux
by Matt CholickI installed Linux on my laptop the other night. I went with Ubuntu, which is what's currently on my second PC. I'm a fan. It has a lot of community support, which is really useful when troubleshooting problems. DistroWatch shows how it's becoming pretty popular.
It was a little nerve-wracking just before writing my partition table (I shrunk the Windows partition and hoped for no data loss). Windows did get its feathers a bit ruffled on first boot but all seems well now. On a Linux boot, WiFi works, the sound and volume buttons work, and even that little red finger mouse IBMs has works.
This is something of a test run. If I manage to do all the essentials, the Windows partition is going to disappear. I still haven't set up my development environment (Eclipse, XEmacs, PHP, Apache2, MySQL, Java 1.5...) but it looks good. This is really an overdue change. I've been meaning to make the switch more wholeheartedly, but laziness has stopped me. I'm glad that external needs finally forced it.