Twinge
This, naturally, requires time and effort.
I have a tingling sensation towards the back of my brain that pulsates from time to time when I consider (as Fred so appropriately put it while playing go) "joining the light side," by which, of course, I mean abandoning Microsoft and taking an as yet ill-understood plunge into an alternative OS.
The tingling excites me, in a strange sort of way, as it represents something new to learn and explore while almost instantaneously guaranteeing me membership into the broad and distributed underground network that is "everyone else."
The hesitation comes from my natural inclination towards maintaining my expert knowledge of my OS and everything that comes with that fundamental understanding (keyboard shortcuts, troubleshooting techniques, driver maintenance, etc., etc.). The truth is I think I would have a hard time giving up my comfort-level with the Monolith that is the Microsoft conglomerate of software.
I suppose what I would really like is an opportunity to ease myself into the water - running the systems in parallel - before dunking my head in and drowning myself utterly.
This, naturally, requires time and effort, and probably a switch-box to enable me to use only one keyboard and mouse for both systems, not to mention some resourcefulness to come up with a system to run this alternate OS on.
I will welcome any "conversion" strategies that do not advocate a complete and immediate transition. I want to learn something new (FreeBSD, RedHad Linux, something with a nice GUI on it, etc.), but feel like I need my hand held through the process.
So many questions.