YesJust about anything you can do on a Windows box.
There aren't as many games ported for Linux, but there are some (ID port most of theirs, I think. I'm not much of a gamer, so could be wrong). This can be worked around to a point by using emulators or 'compatibility layers'. I also sometimes have trouble with proprietary video codecs (eg. WMV). No big deal though, and no real problems apart from that. Open Office can handle MS Office documents, so no worries there.
The big advantage (apart from security) is the amount of free software you can get, and how easily you can get it (if you run something like Debian or Ubuntu, you have an excellent package management system).
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Thu 21 Jun 2007, 20:22,
archived)
There aren't as many games ported for Linux, but there are some (ID port most of theirs, I think. I'm not much of a gamer, so could be wrong). This can be worked around to a point by using emulators or 'compatibility layers'. I also sometimes have trouble with proprietary video codecs (eg. WMV). No big deal though, and no real problems apart from that. Open Office can handle MS Office documents, so no worries there.
The big advantage (apart from security) is the amount of free software you can get, and how easily you can get it (if you run something like Debian or Ubuntu, you have an excellent package management system).
.Oh, and hardware compatibility's traditionally been a problem, but much less so now. I've only really had trouble with certain wifi adaptor drivers, but there's a way to use Windows drivers instead where necessary (NDISWrapper), so it's not an insurmountable problem, just takes some fiddling.
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Thu 21 Jun 2007, 21:17,
archived)