safe to move from vista

k3b can do everything plus more of what nero can do. And as far as making copies of dvds and stuff, that takes a bit of ingenuity, and the makeisofs command.

Unfortunately not true any more..

There are gui tools like acidrip and tovid/todisk which automate the whole process simple and quick.

Dependencies can be awkward on some distros, but debian (not the best for closed source formats) has everything needed to make classy professional looking dvd's.

qdvdauthor is coming along nicely, and avidemux will convert just about anything to anything else.

Codecs are sometimes awkward. It's all as usual a WIP with dvd tools.

The only thing with K3B.. make sure you have all the audio codecs and conversion tools you need before installing.. it can have problems finding say an .aac codec when it needs one. Otherwise it kills nero for tools.. especially nero8 which is IMHO really restrictive.

If you decide to switch to linux completely you will need some links for multimedia tools..

debian repositories will work on ubuntu too

http://debian-multimedia.org/ .. for codecs, and feature filled players

http://www.rarewares.org/debian.php .. as they say.. rare things

http://www.rjamorim.com/rrw/index.html .. other odd and unusual things