I'd been meaning to get into Linux for some time for a variety of reasons; this article sums up some of my thinking. In addition to those reasons, though, as an IT professional and budding computer programmer, I felt like Linux would remove some of the barriers between me and the guts of the computer. Which is less true of say, Ubuntu, but maybe we'll get to that later.
At any rate, what had really been stopping me was a matter of physical space. I just didn't have the room to set up a PC, desktop or otherwise, and leave it there for any period more than a day. Being primarily laptop-bound reinforced this. Our new place with its very nice basement, along with a very secondhand but wholly serviceable desk has finally given me room to set up "shop." This is really still in the process of being organized, but it's functional and I've been able to settle in a little bit and do some work.
All this having been accomplished, once the older laptop was unpacked (which of course took weeks) I set it up and started looking at Linux distributions to get a start with. Ultimately the choice of distro means very little, as Linux is extraordinarily customizable and you can add what you want and cut what you don't need, but I settled on what is for a lot of folks the Linux standard-bearer these days — Ubuntu.
Installing Ubuntu clean — that is, over any existing operating system — is very easy and requires absolutely no technical knowledge whatsoever, just a basic familiarity with computers. Get the download here; it comes in the form of an .iso file, or image, which you can then burn to a DVD (or CD if the image is small enough, but Ubuntu's isn't.) You can then boot from this disc. For some PCs the screen will show what key to hit during startup to get to the boot menu, while for others you'll need to look it up, but usually it's Escape or F12. Boot from the disc, follow the onscreen instructions, and Linux and everything onboard will be working hitchlessly in just a little while.
That was my experience, anyway; one of the hallmarks of Linux is its stability and reliability, and I had absolutely no issues with using any of the stuff that came with Ubuntu, which includes the really surprisingly nice LibreOffice suite, all for media playback and wireless networking, a bunch of system tools and other stuff. The whole experience was almost disturbingly smooth, not at all the troublesome installations some tales might lead one to expect.
From there I did a few things: installed some new apps including Steam, burned image discs of a bunch of different distributions to try out a few different things running Linux off a Live disc and played a bit with getting Linux on my primary PC. This has turned out to be trickier, since there are some Windows apps on my "working" computer that cannot be dispensed with, and I need to get that business straightened out before I can migrate entirely to Linux. There have been a few minor triumphs and misadventures since then, but that's the story so far.
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