Time for the swtich has come.

[Gene Wilson]

On Thu, 27 Jan 2005 22:06:56 -0500, Kyle Lagonegro (Student-Lagone37)
<Lagone37 at cortland.edu> wrote:
> 
> I'm finally fed up with Windows and Microsoft in general.  I just signed up to this mailing list and am making the first steps to moving over to Linux.  From what I have read Fedora is the way to go.  So now I must download, but before I make the switch I have some questions:
> 
> 1) Is it a good idea to do the dual particion so I keep WinXP for a while?  Because frankly I want it gone as fast as possible...

I definately vote for keeping Windows around at least for a while for
a number of reasons:
1. For whatever reason, there's always a chance with any OS
installation that it just won't work.  I've installed or upgraded
Fedora seven or eight times with no problems but you never know.  It's
just seems like a good contingency plan to keep a running OS installed
as a backup in case of a botched install.
2. Disks are so cheap now that keeping 10 or 20 Gig devoted to a
windows partition doesn't really do much harm.
3. Every once in a while you may actually need it.  I've used Linux
for nine years and as my primary desktop OS for about seven years now
and I still use windows for some things that don't work on Linux. 
Wine (a tool that lets you run Windows executables on Linux) does a
good job with some things such as MS-Office and Lotus Notes but still
won't run some things that I need such as MS-Project and Visio.  The
list of things that I need windows for keeps getting smaller and will
go away totally with a couple of years but not yet.
4. Games.  There are still some games that I boot into windows for.

With all that said, even if you do leave the Windows partition around,
you'll probably find that you're using it less and less until one day
you realize that you haven't booted into Windows for a month.  Then
you can get rid of it.

Good luck.