I'm thinking of dual booting windows vista with linux.
I already have vista, and i was wondering if anyone who has used/uses linux can tell me if its any good, worth doing at all... =D

thanks in advance

If you haven't decided on a distro, I recommend Ubuntu for easily passing from Vista to Linux. Maybe Kubuntu which comes with KDE.

Note that if you're going to install it, I recommend getting on IRC immediately afterwards, as setting up drivers and such are almost always a pain.

i have all my drivers on a disc.
Its more a question of is it worth dual booting with linux.
Or is it a complete waste of time?

I don't mean getting the drivers is hard. Installing them is a pain. For nvidia you have to shut down X then reboot, etc.

It's not simply an install. And windows drivers don't work on Linux.

And it is usually worth it.

Linux is fine for everything but games. So yeah. Just boot Windows when ya wanna play some TF2 or whatever. I would make sure you know which disto you want to use, and which one best fits your needs. It would be better to use a more complicated disto of Linux if it will work better for you in the long run.

To be honest, I'd save up for a few months and buy a semi-decent box for a few hundred dollars and install Ubuntu on it, you'll get a far better experiance from it.

Because, if you go dualbooting, and screw up your windows partition, you'll be so extremely pissed off at Linux, you'll most likely not use it again, and spread negativeness.

An alternative is to use a second hard disk or partition (a good program for this is partitionmagic, which allows you to partition without losing data) and install it on there.

Linux however, is very much a workstation platform, designed for development and work. It's basically worthless if all you do is game (wine sucks for intensive software), and you'd be better off with Windows or Mac OSX if you want to create visual art.

There's also the consideration that it will take a little while to learn how to use it, to get all your dependencies and drivers in order and to get comfortable with the OS. Ubuntu, as Jok suggested is pretty good for this, so it shouldn't be too much of a pain.
Once all that has been done, however, Linux can be a very nice thing to use. It's fast, stable, reliable, can be updated rapidly and automatically, and it has a whole bunch of built-in functionality that can be pretty cool if you use it.

It's not everyone's cup of tea, though. Try it out, see if you like it. If not, that's fine.

Actually, I've had Half-Life 2 and Garrys Mod running well using wine in Ubuntu, after a few small issues where I had to go and find the font that steam uses, and an odd glitch with the toolgun screen in Gmod. I also lost about 10 FPS versus windows, but that's certianly not a huge issue. I'm not too sure on other games however, because I don't really play all that many. I couldn't figure out how to make Doom3 work, and I have one or two other games that simply wouldn't work at all.

hmm... i have decided that linux can get fucked. =D

Thanks for help. <3

Try FreeBSD... it's way better.