Is it worth using Ubuntu?

Ubuntu will work very well on PCs. But as Hobbit says, you have to have the patience to learn it. It is quite different from Windows. I am sometimes playing around with it in a virtual partition and also with Fedora off a stick. But I never really got the hang of it.
I learned most from a book called "Ubuntu Kung Fu" by Thomas

I love Ubuntu, but I want to advise you against 64-bit versions. They're not as compatible or stable as the 32-bit versions. Ubuntu as a whole, though, manages resources much better than Windows does. It doesn't have much of a learning curve actually, unless you want to get your hands dirty. The Official Ubuntu forums are really a great place to look things up and ask for help. What you need to know when installing Ubuntu is that the 2 most popular interfaces are Gnome and KDE. Gnome is the standard Ubuntu interface with a bar on top for Applications, Places, and System. KDE presents more of a Windows-like interface with a psuedo-Start Menu. No matter what flavor you choose, all software will run on both.

If it's your first time using it, I recommend you install using Wubi, which will install Ubuntu to a directory inside Windows, but will act like a normal installation, allowing you to choose between it and Windows at bootup. If you don't like it, you can uninstall it through Add/Remove programs in Windows. All you do is choose a username and password, what interface you want, and the amount of space you want to allocate. It does the rest while you do something else.

To force it to install the 32-bit version, create a shortcut to the Wubi installer, right click on it, click Properties. In the target box, add "--32bit" to the end (inside the quotes).

Linux "can" be very stable. However, typically with desktop distros and people trying to get eye candy and the like going...stability sometimes suffers. As a long time Ubuntu user, I don't think that I would describe Ubuntu as "a lot more stable than Windows 7".

Linux is a great OS to learn and understand. The primary value that I get is an open mind as to what else is out there and available. I'm not stuck with whatever my primary OS says I have to do.

Playing with Linux in a virtual machine (like VirtualBox or VMWare Player 3), is a great way to learn lots and gives you the ability to play and poke with changing out hard drives and easily learning some of the new concepts.

acurasd said:

That server edtion is something else. All text...very very interesting... I moved over to the desktop version.

Yeah, quite often Linux servers are simply text based machines. I use CentOS for our Linux servers at work and I NEVER install a GUI on any of them. There is no reason to take up the extra disk space, extra overhead and have more to patch on the box. For those who are very leery of going this route, look into webmin. You can install webmin and then manage the Linux box from a web browser.