I've never used linux before fancy a change and need some advice?

Can I still do as I would in windows 7 for example.....use firefox, have pc tools antivirus installed, have my roboform installed and play games as normal like from steam etc?

If so I might give it a go

yes well kind of LOL

firefox yes
AV no need

my roboform ? have no clue but you should be able to play most games

but be prepared to spend a bit of time on config it's not as easy as windows but most the time worth the time
also I don't think Linux is as polished as windows but hey it works.

I've had a love hate relationship with linux for 15 years

Well I read some reviews I don't know what Zorin is like really another form of Linux?

I like to play games on my pc and reviews say you can't really play games well on a linux setup

well ya kind of , you can still play games but I guess not hard core shit

There are some games made for Linux, a few popular titles that have Linux versions, and some work fine in a properly installed and configured Wine. My experiences running Windows in a virtual machine have so far been pretty crappy...seems you need a pretty powerful machine to do it, especially for gaming. Wine on the other hand doesn't have the overhead that comes with running one OS inside another.

Honestly, though, if you do a lot of gaming you're probably better off dual-booting Windows and Linux.

That's what it basically comes down to.

Linux is great for servers, workstations and hobbyists. Windows is great for gaming. I am horribly generalizing there, but mainly how it applies to you.DirectX is very sophisticated and there's no competition to it on any other platform. You'll have to jump through hoops to get things working in Linux, and although it can be rewarding to get it working, it's just not practical.

I generally put Ubuntu on my older boxes as the main OS. I just like to tinker with it and try something different. There's not a lot of secrets/new windows maneuvers I don't know.

Not a big fan of partitioning hard drives to dual boot Windows/Linux, but I did that for a while.

You can't play most windows games without using transgaming Cedega
it's a set of graphics libraries and windows dlls

I believe steam is now supported, it wasn't for a long time

steam won't work without cedega

some games and apps just will not work
good luck getting any adobe product to run in it

linux is better for servers
or for high end 3d gfx work where the machine has multiple processors and is rendering to a server

it's not really that great for a desktop, it's ok

but if you're a gamer, its better to either try linux in virtualbox
or dual boot linux
so you can still play games in windows

I do game design as a hobby
so I stick with windows
better performance and less headaches

for nix work I use virtuabox in windows

It's funny, you'd think if the Linux community REALLY wanted some hardcore converts, they'd get on that whole "you can't play games on Linux" thing... I mean really, it's got everything gamers want (it's free, customizable, tune-able, stable, non-resource-intensive) it just won't run 90% of high end games (or 100% if you don't have the time/patience/money to acquire and set up the resources you need).

How is the Linux community supposed to do anything about that? Games are mostly written exclusively for Windows. The Linux community can do only two things to fix that: nag, nag, nag game developers (doesn't do any good usually), and continue to make improvements to Wine (not that easy trying to build open source software to use closed libraries). I'm not sure what the deal is with Cedega/GameTree, but it sounds like something that is not within the power of the Linux community to control.

Game developers who focus on Windows have decided it's not worth the effort...even some who in the past have made Linux versions are hesitant to continue. You have to make two versions of the engine...one that uses DirectX and one that uses OpenGL. This is made even more complicated since Nvidia has decided to cripple OpenGL in Geforce cards.

Develop a DirectX competitor? I dunno. I'm not a programmer, and have no authority to speak, since my Linux skills are pretty basic. It just seems to me that with the pool of developers and enthusiasts that Linux has to draw from, they ought to be able to come up with something. On the other hand, I'm probably just talking out of my ass.

OpenGL is already a competitor of the video part of DirectX, and a good one (to the extent that in some cases the same game on the same hardware could get better performance in Linux than it did in Windows). But thanks to some Microsoft fudging of OpenGL in Windows years ago (and probably a lot of back scratching), many game devs decided to go exclusively with DirectX. I suppose it might be possible to clone DirectX, so Linux ports could be more easily made, but I assume that it would bring up a whole pile of legal issues...might be better just to stick with improving Wine.

In any case, it still comes down to the big game developers and publishers. As long as they are unwilling to bother with Linux, there will be very little gaming. What little is currently available isn't too bad, by the way, although a lot of it is lacking polish....there are several games that work beautifully, but have very little or poorly crafted content.

it's cause windows is closed source
so you need actual windows files.

This has been the main reason linux has never caught on for desktop use. Even secretaries addicted to minesweeper can't dig the linux versions.

there just isn't enough sales to dedicate the resource fork for games into linux.

It's a server OS designed for serving files and math computing