For the average techie who wants to make the transition to Linux, I’ve found Ubuntu to be fantastic (and it’s free as in beer and speech). It’s a fairly simple and straightforward distribution, and has good community support. I’m also a big fan of Debian (at least on the server), which Ubuntu is based on. On my spare machine, I actually run Kubuntu, which is the KDE version of Ubuntu (which uses Gnome), because I find myself more comfortable with KDE.

I’ve been trying to make the switch from Windows for several years, but there are just a few killer apps that have kept me on Windows. I’ve tried Fedora, SuSE, Ubuntu, Mandriva, and Xandros on the desktop. I really like Fedora, but Ubuntu is gaining more and more of my attention. As the article says, it just works (at least as much as can be expected from a modern Linux distro). I’m still light years away from making the switch, and since I’m currently an ASP.NET developer, I may never make the switch (yes, I’m aware of Mono). But it’s a cool distro to play with.

I’m also fond of Win4lin, which allows you to run Windows in a virtual environment on Linux. However, the standard and home versions only run Windows 9x. The Pro version, which allows Windows 2000 and XP costs $70. Not too bad of a price, but it slightly diminishes the value of switching to Linux in the first place. CrossOver Office Standard costs only $40, but it doesn’t give me the flexibility of Win4lin for doing real testing, and I dislike dual-booting.

• Ubuntu carves niche in Linux landscape