So your sick of windows and you don't want a game handicapped Mac and you don't know what your options are, maybe you are just sick of paying 650 dollars for a piece of software that requires a 200 dollar update the minute you install it.  First let me start by saying I don't hate Windows entirely nor do I hate Mac entirely, both are extremely easy to use and thus made more accessible to more people, and we all know the more you know about computers the easier life can be.  Windows and Mac are great for what they do and I still keep a small portion of my hard disk set aside for XP in case of emergencies.

    Okay my first piece of advice is to browse, there are many versions or better known as Distributions of Linux and each although follow fairly the same theme have different things to offer.  For this short guide I will be using Ubuntu Ultimate Gamers Edition because it is to date in my opinion the best distro available in terms of included programs and ease of use.  When you know which distro you want you need to download its ISO image and burn it to either a CD or DVD, in my particular distro you can boot off of this disc try Linux out before you decide to permanently install it (we can all sympathize with this right?).

So You Want To Install?
We thought you would, okay this part is a little harder but nowhere near impossible.  First you need to click the little install icon after which you will be prompted by a screen requesting that you set up a user account of sorts, do that and move on you will soon be asked how you would like to install it, if you have multiple disks you can install it on your extra disk so that you have a boot choice at startup then pick the drive you wish to install to (this will format the drive) I recommend this if you are not great with working with hard drive partitions otherwise you can work out a table to manual partition for the partitions you need.  You technically need 3 partitions, a swap file (similar to a page file in windows serves as an overflow when you run out of ram) a file system partition (this is the partition /  you want to be the largest.)  Once finished and this will take a while just reboot and you have Linux.