Wondering

[Gillydior]

Hiya, Firstly I'd like to say I'm becoming disillusioned with windows especially having downloaded windows 8 (which I think looks awful), then switching back to 7, though between the two I did try Ubunto, but that was just too much like hard work to use
Anyhow I was wondering if anyone could help by pointing me in the right direction please , namely;
I think I'd like to get a Chromebook (the new one) but I have some windows OS based programs that I'd still like to use, which I don't think would be possible on such a device, is there anyway that I could use these by having them on another laptop or hub-storage thing! and then access them wirelessly from the Chromebook - oh and maybe store all my music and photo's on it as well?
Any help would be appreciated thank you Gilly
PS. Please don't suggest anything "Scr"apple as that would just be offensive

 

[Shane2943]

What windows based progs do you need to run?

 

[Gillydior]

Hiya,
I have a Rosetta Stone language package, Sonos music system and would like to use Thunderbird email - though not essential, so besides that not much else really.
I would like to be able to wirelessly store my photo's and stuff too, I do have cloud access with Drive etc. but it's just not the same as actually having stuff at home!
any help would be appreciated, thanks Gilly.

 

[Shane2943]

Ok, looks like Rosetta stone is hit or miss running in emulation in Linux (which is what Chrome is). Sonos I can't really tell. Do a google search for "sonos linux" and read what pops up. Thunderbird runs natively in Linux with no emulation required, as does firefox.

I wouldn't run from Linux completely. I don't know much about Google Chrome, but I do know that it is Linux under the hood, I just don't know what they've done on top of it. I would try another major distro of Linux. Like OpenSUSE, Mandriva, or Mint to see if those are to your liking.

You can always install linux next to Windows on the HDD and choose to boot to either Windows or Linux at boot. Or you can install Linux, then install VM software and run Windows inside Linux in a VM (virtual machine).

 

[linuxrich]

+1 for the point Shane2943 raised about trying a Linux distro other than Ubuntu. There's a lot to like about Mint for example.

 

[argedion]

FEDORA or DIE

Ok for a starter I would really just recommend using a live disk and playing around with it. (usb) would be the prefered method and if your able to get persistent memory that would be great (persistent saves your stuff and settings)

Sabayon is nice its based of Gentoo
OpenSuse is user friendly and a decent distro based on Red Hat

I also recommend reading as much as you can about how to use Linux. Start using Cross platform programs like Firefox, Chromium, Thunderbird, VLC, LibreOffice, and others. This will prepare you for using Linux by giving you the programs your already familiar with.

Hit the forums up as well. Most distro's have forums and most can give you tons of information about the distro.