Should Nathaniel go Open ?

Well he asked me the question, so I reckoned I owe him an answer. The answer is as simple as yes or no, and being an advocate for software freedom, of course I believe everybody should use free software even if there is some initial inconvenience for them simply because the freedoms gained are more valuable than convenience.

That said, any software migration is a tricky business, no less so for a person on his own PC so it’s smart to go about it the right way.
Herewith then, my generic howto for preparing to venture into the world without windows (a side effect of it being the world without walls…), most of this has been written about before, but I’ll try to do the short concise version.

I would recommend grabbing one of the linux live cd versions (of course I suggest OpenLab) and trying it out first, find out what you like, and more importantly try out the applications related to what you do, see what’s missing, and also what you will gain. Then look at the “missing” list, ask your geek friends or local LUG about running them in wine or finding replacements.
Once you’ve done that, look at what remains on the “missing” list. Now rate them by how critical they are. Can you do your job without them ? Sometimes the answer will be no, unfortunately it takes time to replace every computing tasks (although in reality there is 10 000 times as many free software projects as proprietary ones – I kid you not) so some things we don’t have yet. If there is only a few, then you should look at a dual-boot for the interim, this may in fact be a good choice even on the mid-term to allow you to migrate at your own pace, but it’s only worth the effort if you do promise yourself to use your linux system as much as you can in order to eventually leave the old system behind (litterally, if you don’t then why bother).
Either way, you are now ready to install GNU/Linux on your machine, either by itself or as a dual-boot system. In either case, you will need to partition and format at least part of your hard drive so the most important thing at this stage is to do a full backup of all your data (you should do that about once a week anyway), if you are going for a dual-boot, install the other operating system first using about half the drive. GNU/Linux is good at seeing that you have another OS and sharing with it, some other OS’s are not so good at dealing with dual-boots, so this way round let’s you utilize the compatibility features of your new system.
If an OS install of any variety is daunting to you, this is the time to call a geek friend and ask for help, ideally, also let him spend a little time installing any critical fixes released by the distro and showing you how to do this yourself, and most importantly, how to install new software on your chosen distro so that you can add what you need (note to the heek in question, show kpackage or synaptic or gslapt or whatever the appropriate GUI tool is, leave the commandline for when your friend herself is ready to venture there).
And voila, you are ready to begin your journey into the free world. Like any exploration, it’s an adventure and that adventure will become it’s own reward.