Joining the forum

A wonderful operating system, recently gaining power and increasing popularity. VERY FRIENDLY. Reliable, easy to use and less demanding of resources (if compared with the same Windows). A lot of decent distributions: Mandriva, Open SUSe, Fedora (each of them is good in its own way). But personally, I chose Ubuntu, I use 64-bit. I use Gnome graphical environment, those who want to use KDE graphical environment should install Kubuntu.
And most importantly, what distinguishes this operating system from Windows, is that the user does not work under the administrator account, thereby reducing the risk of infection with viruses (no need to spend money on buying an antivirus). A very interesting and flexible approach has been implemented here.
Those who will be difficult to move right away with Windows, you can install Wine and through it run your usual programs and even install games (the Ubuntu itself is not a serious system and is not intended for games).
You can also install the virtual machine Vmware and VirtualBox and test various operating systems.