Ok smart guy, so where do we start?

So I have been unofficially running this experiment for a year, using primarily free software as much as possible. However, I will admit that I have been using windows almost exclusively for work purposes, along with lotus notes, and the office suite.

This is going to be completely free, so AWAY WITH YOU commercial programs!

I had three main choices I was looking at for the big bad linux.

Ubuntu Linux has probably come the farthest towards making Linux available to the masses. It is fully featured, stable, has a wealth of programs available, and I have a long history of using it.

But that wouldn't be fair. This is to see if average joe can do this.

So I turn to two other variants:

gOS and Linux Mint.

They are actually both offshoots of the Ubuntu distribution, and marketed towards user-friendlyness and elegance.

I'm going to start with gOS for a few reasons.

First, to put it bluntly, it looks like a mac. It takes design cues heavily from the latest feline version of the MacOSX, and people like that. Few people look at a mac and say "Man, they don't know a THING about design!"

Second, gOS was built from the ground up to be an easy to use, fast, and user oriented distro. It is packaged on ultra-low cost pcs sold at walmart, so it has a user base.

Third, it is snappy and responsive on the pc I will be testing.

It is going to take some doing to get everything to work as it should, and that will be in the next design brief.