A few unix questions

Ok, so I managed to crash my windows XP OS, and am in the process of trying to get the laptop back up and running. My questions are, should I keep windows XP, or change to unix? How hard would unix be to install on a computer, will all my programs transfer over to unix? I am wanting a stable OS that I can still run all of my stuff on. I have photoshop elements, studio 10 video editing, and other various software titles for windows, as well as mozilla. Do you recomend keeping windows, or no? If you recomend changing, can someone give me directions as to how I can install the other OS?

I appreciate all the help,

Section8

The short answer is, keep Windows.

I know, no one would ever expect ME to say that.

Let me explain. It's what you are used to, and what you know. You have stated your knowledge is slight regarding Unix or variants so migrating to a new OS AND new applications (photoshop will not run, etc.) would be a serious learning curve and would take some time and patience on your part.

That being said, there are applications like gimp which are very photoshop-like, as well as other tools which could process the sort of applications you wish. There's also open office.org to replace MS Office and even inter-operate with documents created in that environment.

To that end, i will include the following link;
http://www.pcbsd.org
Which is a desktop installable ISO image for a complete windowed Unix OS replete with .pbi's (PCBSD installables) to make the installation of free apps even simpler. I run it on my Unix desktops, with great success.
It's easy to install (simpler than windows) and just works.

Best of luck.

well, while the advice was good, I am the kind of person who is willing to learn. I learn best by being in a position where I am out of place and going to town...I have Ubuntu Linux on my system at the moment...and thus far the only issue is wifi, it wont let me install the drivers...its the broadcom 1390. not sure if its related, but it is not getting the "linux-headers" when doing the install, would that cause the problem?

Ubuntu is a great start for Linux. There are a lot of people to help you, it is simple and has the synaptic package manager. I'd suggest going into #ubuntu on irc.freenode.org and asking there - I'm sure they can help you.

I'm glad to hear that I chose a good version of linux, and that I have room to grow with it. I will likely be getting into the server side of it later on, as my schooling progresses.

Thank you for the help

section8ff

If you still haven't got your wifi up and running try the following walk through

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=297092