New To Linux

[Wizardskills]

Hi Guys

I have just made a new comp (In Sig) and i only have one OS (XP Pro). Now to keep running my old pc i would have to change OS to keep it all legal . This posed a bit of a problem as i didn't really want to fork out around £300 for Vista. So i thought to myself, why not try Linux. I have used it for some of my coursework at uni to make Lex scripts and i knew that there were windows like GUI version of it around.

So i thought, I'll try Linux on my old PC and see if it is any good. I found a version called Freespire 2.0.0 and i now have it running. It's not running to fast but that can be expected from a 1 Ghz Athlon with 128Mb of RAM, however from my first impressions i am very impressed. The first time i booted put my system i found that there was a multitude of programs that would have taken me a couple of hours to get installed on windows already there (OpenOffice, Instant Messaging, Image Editing etc).

I am seriously considering putting my new PC onto Linux (possibly a different distribution). However i would appreciate some advice/information before hand from people that have a lot more experience with it than me.

First and for most i will be using my new PC mainly for gaming with the new and upcoming games (Crysis, UT3, CSS, Bioshock etc), however i know Linux does not support DirectX as standard. Now most of these new games will be using Microsoft's DirectX 10. Are there any Linux programs that will allow these games to work in DirectX 10 or a Linux equivalent. I am aware that there is a program called WINE that can run games in DirectX however i am unsure of how well this works and i am not really in the position to test this with the limited specs of my test comp. Are there any programs that will allow games to be played with DirectX 10 or even 9 in Linux?

Secondly, i do a fair bit of programming in Java in a SDK called Eclipse and would like to keep doing so if i were to swap over to Linux. I see from the eclipse website that there is a version of for Linux however, does java work ok on Linux based systems. I can see no problem as to why it wouldn't work but any experience you have in this are would be appreciated.

Thirdly, i also do quite a bit of 3D work in a program called Cinema 4D and i don't believe that they have a Linux based version of this software. Is there a way to get this software to work within the Linux environment?

I really would appreciate your input as i really don't want to spend more money of my money on a OS that i don't feel 100% comfortable with.

Many Thanks

Wiz

 

[Wizardskills]

Firstly, thanks for all of your comments, they have been very helpful .

The first thing to remember is that Linux is not Windows. It won't behave the same all the time and the sooner you accept that the sooner you'll enjoy your experience.

Secondly, i am aware that Linux is not like windows at all and wasn't expecting it to be

From all of your posts it seem that Linux is unable to play games to the same level as windows and as this is what i will be using my new comp for this has basically ruled it out as being the main OS on it. Also with the only 3D program that will natively run on Linux being Blender, this has not helped its cause as blender is quite basic compared to C4D.

As for programing it would seem that Linux is much better, and for this reason i may be installing a version of Linux as a secondary OS.

With this in mind are there and distributions of Linux that are built for programing (mainly Java)?

Many thanks for all of you posts

Wiz