I much prefer emacs to vi because it doesn't have editing modes. You don't have to use a key to get in and out of insert made; you just type. Now, emacs modes are different, they are automatic ways the editor handles the kind of content you are typing in, weather prose or programs.
On this Windows Vista system ( Compaq Presario, Athelon Duel Core, 3 GB RAM), I have not yet sliced up the disk to install a Linux. I have not decided which Linux to install and I have not yet come to a conclusion as to which way I'd like to run one of many Linux distributions because I have not resolved the questions I have about virtualization options. I did Install Virtual Box from Sun but I don't feel that it is fully flexible. In fact, I ran Open Solaris live CD just fine from a cold boot, but the X-server failed from the same image under Virtual Box. I also run Mint Linux from its live CD image, and even installed a package, but it did not install to the hard disk area set asside for Virtual Box as I thought it should. It just ran the live distro as if it had booted from the real machine. I was not ready to install to the virtual hard drive, but maybe I should have.
One thing I have found out about Ubuntu from one of its varients is that the default fonts are really nice. They are not as pleasing as the one in a web editor I saw on Mandriva, but they are better than Cygwin, which in turn is not as good as Vista. The text viewer on Vista really does rich text to ordinary ASCII files and uses a pretty nice font.
I have a DVD of several Linux Distros from the Linux Bible of 2008, which I want to try. These are likely to be less bleeding edge than some of the ones shipped with Linux Format Magazine. By far the biggest problem with Linux Distros is the X-server and its realtive stupidity at handling different displays. It often just refuses to run in any intelligent way.
I have discarded Microsoft Mail and Internet Explorer in favor of Mozilla Browser and Thunderbird on Vista, because I think I will use them on Linux and because I know Thunderbird works better with Usenet than Microsoft Mail. It does yEnC, but not rar encoding.
One compromise I accepted to get this system cleaply was to accept that it only had a 250 GB disk, I say "only" with a grin because I well remember when 9 GB was a huge drive, but OS's have bloated with the hardware and my Vista install already has about 100 GB of usage or close to it. I went and uninstalled things I know I am not going to use, like Microsoft Office, but there are still a couple of real disk hogs, like the DVD burning software. I'd like to have about 50 GB for my files in a separate /home partition and several small Linux root paritions for different distros. I am aiming for Debian and Fedora, but I am interested enough in which Ubuntu has done that I may make one for that as well.
My plan is to depricate Vista because of security concerns and make a Linux my main system on this machine.
It looks like the BIOS has an option from booting from a USB device. I hadseen that feature on another more-expensive desktop I had looked at and thought that I had shot myself in the foot for not checking this system to see if it had the feature. I could then boot an OS from a stick or from a recycled harddrive.
Down the road I'd like to refurbish the Mike box, add more memory to it and redo its disk. I will need to add a DVD burner to it as well. I will need to create the separate /home for it as well and redo the Linux stuff on it as well. Open Solaris did not run well on it because it only has half a Gig of memory.
One todo is to see if the Mike box would accept the memory from the Toshiba lap top and also to see if I can get an external enclosure for the drive from that now dead system. It would have cost me half of what I paid for this system to just replace the battery on that old laptop. I'd be better off to buy a decent desktop and move the resources from that system to the Mike box, which needs more memory and to make the laptop's disk a bootable USB disk. I expect a Linux boot from that disk to fail because of display issues.