Kat wrote:

> If you have the hard drive space and memory you can run Windows
> programs in
> Linux using a Windows emulator.  There are a few on the market as
> well as an
> open source one called, Wine.

I should probably stay out of this, as operating system discussions often
quickly degenerate into jihads, but...

Wine is an absolute dog performance-wise. Yes you can get a fair amount of
very well behaved windows apps to run on it, but the speed hit even on a
fast machine with a ton of RAM is in the range most people would define as
unacceptable.

In truth (and I say this as one who hates microsoft and runs linux wherever
I can) if you need to run windows apps, it's best to configure your machine
to dual boot linux and windows. Also, even though great strides have been
made with linux as far as ease of installation and usability go, linux is
still NOT ready for prime time as a desktop OS. I would not recommend linux
to anyone who is not a geek.

I say this fully aware that I'll likely catch a lot of flack, but that
doesn't change the plain facts.

Brent