Now I won’t be proclaiming that everyone should abandon Windows in favor of Linux as I have always stated that as long as the machine is doing what you want you should continue to use it happily. But I will say that it is enjoyable and much more easy to use than I remember from past iterations. If you ever do switch here’s some things to keep in mind (which is valid as I write this, who knows what will happen down the road):

1. Fedora 10 32-bit live cd doesn’t have the samba client pre-installed (easy to add though).
2. Lots of applications that support Linux seem to be available only in 32-bit (Google Gears) but there seems to be a slow push towards adding 64-bit support for some apps (e.g. Flash support for Linux 64-bit just went alpha).

Of course I installed Houdini and for the sake of saving others some searching, here are some things that I did in Feora 10 that got it installed:

1. Get the video card driver for your machine. Sure there is the default driver loaded on your machine but for me at least I needed to the full monty.  For Fedora, I used the ATI rpm as per the instructions here (NVIDIA instructions found here). For the ATI portion be advised that after using the init 3 command you’ll leave the GUI, so be sure to have the rest of the commands written down somewhere.
2. Install Houdini by unpaking the gcc 4.1 build of Houdini and in a terminal going to the Houdini install folder and typing ./houdini_install as root, then follow the instructions. I didn’t seem to need to do add the “source houdini_setup” line anywhere for Houdini to run.
3. If you’re running SELinux, set the default to permissive and when you run Houdini for the first time, quite any SELinux warnings (so you don’t see them pop up again everytime you open Houdini.

P.S. I fixed Windows on the laptop by running chkdsk, but decided to install Linux anyway.

P.S.S. My main desktop machine is still running 64-bit Vista.