Long gone are the days when you had to run programs by typing in commands within a computer "terminal". Today I run Linux Mint on my laptop and have never touched the "command line". Linux Mint is the "distribution" I'll talk about here.
Since I have just mentioned three terms above, I'll introduce you to what these terms might mean for you as well as other terms and concepts that you might never know if you've only used the Windows operating system. You may never need to use most of these terms but some might be helpful when switching over to Linux.
Think of a "distribution" as a version of the operating system like Windows 95 or Windows 7; different distributions of the same basic system. Most people don't think much about their operating system. Most buy a computer with an operating system installed. The only time you ever think about it is when installing software. Your Mac software won't run on Windows and visa versa.
You may be thinking, "I've never seen Linux at the store. I've never seen Linux programs there either."
This is likely true. Although Dell and others sell Linux computers, most people download Linux off the Internet, free, and it's all legal. GNU/Linux is most often free and so are the programs. Most popular Linux distributions have a program that finds, downloads and removes software over the Internet from within the OS itself.
To get Linux Mint, you go to linuxmint.com, click on the downloads page, find the main edition, click on direct download and wait. I won't go into many installation details because I've covered that in a different article but I will say that I purchased a new Dell laptop with Windows Vista. I fired it up to make sure everything worked and then threw in the Linux Mint CD, shut it down, checked the BIOS settings on startup to make sure it would try booting from the CD drive first, and began the installation. Mint gave me an install option that would resize the existing Windows partition and install the new Linux partition next to it. This way, when I rebooted my computer, it gave me an option of which system to start. I chose this method of installation and everything worked just as it should. No reformatting, no re-installation of Windows. Pretty easy.
Now, below are some terms and some information that you may not know but might be helpful when dealing with your new Linux installation. When you start Linux, the first thing you see is a "Grub menu". For our purposes, it is simply the menu you first see that allows you to select which operating system to boot into. On my installation I saw 4 entries: Linux Mint, Linux Mint (recovery mode), Linux Mint Memtest (for testing system memory). I've never run it so I can't tell you much about it. The last entry (under the heading: Other Operating Systems) is Windows Vista. You might also see a series of letters and numbers after each title. This tells you the partition number your operating system is written on. As you probably know, Windows lists drives (as well as virtual drives on separate partitions of a single, physical hard drive) as A, B, C, D, E, F, G etc. . . GNU/Liunx normally lists partitions as devisions of hda1, hda2, hda3 or sda1, sda2, etc . . . So, our current grub menu might show "Linux Mint 7, Gloria (on /dev/hda5)".
Once the system boots, you'll find an icon on your desktop for your home folder. When I open this folder, the left-hand menu lists my Windows partition as "OS".
A curious thing about Microsoft is that they don't want to think about other operating systems so they don't use a grub menu. So, when you reboot into Windows, your Linux partition won't show as a drive but when you boot into Linux, you can see, access and even write to your Windows partition. So, beware, if you reinstall Windows, your grub menu will be gone. It will look like your Linux OS has disappeared but assuming you didn't accidentally erase the Linux partition, it is still there, you simply have to restore your grub menu in order to access it again.
Another thing you'll notice is that there are passwords for administrator functions in Linux. This is a security feature. Normally, by default, you have to enter a password to login. You also have to enter a password to perform administrative functions.
Some administrative functions are performed as the "Root" user. This is important in Linux. As root, you have total freedom to make changes. With this freedom comes responsibility because you can mess things up. Some people don't like having to use a password at each turn and there are some password prompt you can turn off but make no mistake, you don't have as many system vulnerabilities when passwords are required. Take it from Windows and learn. Microsoft wasn't build around system security and it shows. Only now have they been prompting the user more. Users my get irritated by constant prompts but the option is vulnerability.
Another thing you'll notice is the "file system" folder. Coming from Windows, you could consider the folder as being equivalent to your base "C drive" folder.
SOME WORDS ABOUT DESKTOP ENVIRONMENTS AND WINDOW MANAGERS
With Windows or Mac, you never think about your desktop environment or a window manager.There are no options offered from the vendor although they use them. With Linux you have many options if you have any interest in considering them.
When looking into Linux, you quickly hear terms like, "Gnome desktop" (pronounced Guh-nome, with a hard G), and "KDE desktop". Poking around further you'll soon hear about "XFCE and LXDE desktop environments". Soon you may be further intimidated by hearing about E17, Fluxbox, IceWM, and other window managers.
Most major Linux distributions come with one default desktop environment. Linux Mint, for example, comes with Gnome. The Linux Mint community also offers a KDE version as well as others but the Gnome desktop is standard. But there are some cases when you might want to use another desktop or window manager. This brings me to explaining the difference between desktop environments and window managers.
When computers evolved from the world of text commands to pretty graphical environments, windows evolved with mice and other inputs to control this new world.
You need a window manager to control windows; opening, minimizing, closing, resizing, decorating, etc...
This isn't a complete environment however. It's also nice to have a file manager, background manager, menus etc, so, a complete desktop environment includes all these things.
All of this can be very simple or it can become very complex graphically and therefore resource (read, RAM and processor) intensive. If you are using an old Windows 95 computer, your computing ease might be limited heavyweight desktop components
Enter the lightweight desktop enviroment or window manager. Rather than using all your computer's resuorces trying to run your windows rather than your programs, you can choose to use a lightweight window manager so you computer can spend it's time computing.
In another article I speak of using the LXDE environment to run an old Pentium I 166 processor with 128 MB of RAM on a modern GNU/Linux kernel. The computer would not run under Gnome or KDE. Today you can run an old pre-Pentium 386 or 486 machine with as little as 4Mb RAM on a modern enough Linux kernel by selecting a lightweight file manager like Midnight Commander and a Fluxbox window manager.