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[PremierMeridian]

Someone mentioned free software, does this include word processing etc. ?

[ILikePie]

There's Libreoffice, Openoffice, Abiword, etc. but they don't even come close to Microsoft's products. Though, MS Office doesn't work very nicely on Linux.

[Phmcw]

Yeah, open office used to be on par with word, but lagged behind, because of Oracle buying Sun. It may change, now, with Libreoffice.

You have great professional level world processor for specialized use thought, like latex, Emac and Vim, but they are hard to use.
Latex is a big hit in the scientific community, for instance.

[Darvi]

However LaTex involves code, so for simply making a text document you'd want something else. If it has to look nice and you're good at that kind of thing on the other hand...

[ILikePie]

I don't think your average high-school teacher would accept a LaTeX document, nor does anyone want to learn LaTeX so they can write that paper on American history.

[Phmcw]

For both openoffice is more than ok. I really doubt there would be a difference with word.
I mean ok, word have a few cool features but there isn't such a difference between the two, especially for simple task like that.

[Nintenlord]

I don't think your average high-school teacher would accept a LaTeX document

They don't either in uni, so we always "compile" it to PDF or Postscript or something equivalent.

[Darvi]

Or compile it to paper. That's how our physics teachers work.

[ILikePie]

Meh, you can always write your projects in html then.

For both openoffice is more than ok. I really doubt there would be a difference with word.
I mean ok, word have a few cool features but there isn't such a difference between the two, especially for simple task like that.

Umm.. No, not really. Have you even tried Word? It's far more stable, it's faster, it doesn't crash, it doesn't flip your text all over the place, it parses doc/docx correctly, and it does right-to-left paragraphs correctly. I can go on, but I think you get the picture.

[Phmcw]

I haven't used windows for a long long time, but I never had an crash with open office (in linux).
And well, last time I used word, it was like open office (sometime in 2004). It's only in the last years that, while word got more functionality and bugfixes, OoO became more bloated and unoriginal. Of course if you use open office, don't use Doc format if you can avoid it. Use odf.

[sluissa]

While most people have covered most of the bases here, I will say one more thing I didn't see mentioned. Linux (At least most distros of it) is much more efficient than Any of the Windows OSs I've dealt with. The main reason I got into linux was because I had an old laptop that wasn't getting good performance from Windows XP, even on a fresh install. My old Toshiba Tecra (6100 I think) wouldn't even play video without stutering in Windows. I gave linux a try, and I probably made a huge mistake starting out with slackware, but once I got everything working like I wanted it too (Took several months of trial and error, but I like that kind of computer learning.) it ran most video (up to a certain resolution) fine. I also noticed the simple stuff like word processing programs saw an improvement as well. I'd also managed to get a SNES emulator to work in linux when in windows it was practically unplayable. (zsnes in both cases. I could however, reboot windows into dos mode and get decent performance with dos zsnes, but who wants to do that every time?)

More recently I purchased an early generation netbook. The Eeepc 900. It was only slightly more powerful than the old toshiba tecra, so Linux was the go to choice there, as well. I tried the distro that came with it but found that the "Easy Mode" was too watered down and the "Full Mode" wasn't what I wanted, so I put a netbook centric version of Ubuntu on there and it's been working fine. It's probably more bloated than I need, and I have considered trying something else, or even going back to slackware, but haven't found a good reason to go through the trouble. It does everything I expect it to.

[freeformschooler]

While Openoffice and Libreoffice are pretty okay (as I don't use them for work) I'm going to mention something here: there's a cheap (non-free) Wine "distribution" specifically designed to let you run Microsoft Office on Linux with basically no issues. It has its own database, and much better "customer support" given that it's maintained by a company. I use it because it plays a lot of newer games a lot better than regular Wine would without serious configuration.

[ChairmanPoo]

For the record, ATM I have both Ubuntu 10.10 and Windows 7 starter (came as default) on my computer. I use windows pretty much just for games, and Ubuntu for everything else + some games that I can run without sacrifices in wine.

[Bouchart]

I have an old (2003) computer that has both Windows XP and Linux installed.

I find that Linux has problems emulating many Windows based games but otherwise works fine.  Easy to use.

[Tellemurius]

For the record, ATM I have both Ubuntu 10.10 and Windows 7 starter (came as default) on my computer. I use windows pretty much just for games, and Ubuntu for everything else + some games that I can run without sacrifices in wine.

God starter suck, XP and ubuntu are so much better than that.