Considering switching to Linux entirely...

[Pyroflea]

After a long period of time of running Windoze only, I asked myself why I was still using it. My excuse used to be that I gamed on PC quite a bit. However, recently I haven't touched my PC for gaming, and have exclusively been using PS3. Also, after looking at the AppDB on WineHQ, I've noticed that most of the games I would play on PC run on Linux just fine. I'm in dire need of a Windoze re-install, so I figured I might make the leap, and switch entirely over to Linux.

However, I'm having some issues picking a distribution (I can never seem to decide). I just want something sleep and simple, with some fun desktop effects, and useful programs. Ideally I'd LOVE to do a Gentoo install, but I do not feel my skills are adequate for such an endeavor.

I was looking at Mint and Mandriva, but I really just don't know what to go for anymore. I know this question gets asked a lot (and I'm sorry ), but does anybody have any suggestions for a distro? I mostly just browse forums, chat on IM, listen to music, but I also spend a fair amount of time in CAD and Photoshop.

Also, does 64-bit work well with Linux, or should I stick with 32-bit?

Thanks guys,


- Jesse

 

[Pyroflea]

Alright. So I put all of the data on that partition on to another HD. It's safe there for now. I deleted the NTFS partition, so I've got about 400GB of unallocated space. In Gparted, the "Resize/Move" option is greyed out. I can format this unallocated space, but it mounts as "415GB Filesystem". Is there any way to extend my current partition, or do I just need to use this new partition as storage, leaving it as it?

Thanks,


- Jesse

 

[Ijack]

I don't think you can resize a mounted partition (and you can't unmount your root partition), so you need to boot from a live CD to do it.

Alternatively, you could consider separate partitions for, say, /home and /tmp to free up space on the root partition. A lot of people would consider this good practive in a UNIX-type setup.