To the left is a screenshot of the KDE desktop. This is currently the most popular desktop environment for Linux. Many Linux distributions use KDE as their main desktop. KDE is fully customizable and has tons of extra features and a whole suite of office programs, multimedia apps, internet apps, admin utilities and games that don't come with other desktops. KDE does require at least a Pentium 3 equivalent or higher and 128Megs of RAM to run smoothly. People running older machines will probably want to avoid KDE.

To the right is a screenshot of the Gnome desktop. This was formerly the most popular desktop environment for Linux before development of KDE took off. It offers a lot of pretty eye-candy and is also very customizable. Gnome applications utilize the GTK libraries. It does not require as much computer power to run as KDE, but regardless you will want a faster machine to get good performance.

To the left is a screenshot of the Ice Window Manager running a Windows XP visual theme. If you are running an older computer or do not want all the eye-candy of KDE or Gnome, you will want to consider the Ice Window Manager. It is not a resource hog and will run smoothly on older Pentiums. It appears and has the feel of Windows 9x. The menu and functionality configurations are done via editing of specific text parameter files. There are graphical user interface tools to handle editing of settings for those who do not want to mess around with text files.

To the right is the most popular open-source word processor for Linux, OpenOffice. It can read and write Microsoft Office documents, including Word docs, Excel spreadsheets, and Powerpoint presentations. All the functionality of MS-Word, but OpenOffice is completely free! It can be freely downloaded from openoffice.org and is available for both Windows and Linux. It also normally comes installed as a standard item in most desktop Linux distributions.

To the left is a screenshot of the game Unreal Tournament 2004. Unfortunately, there are not a lot of commercial games available that run natively under Linux. A few other popular games available for Linux are Second Life, Doom 3, Quake 4, Return To Castle Wolfenstein, Neverwinter Nights and Tribes 2. Fortunately, there are tons of free or open-source games available. Have a look at The Linux Game Tome. You may also have some success with running DirectX Windows versions of games using the Cedega emulator.