Which distribution to pick?

http://www.linux.com/forums/topic/1676 That's a good starting place for choosing a Distro. To play WoW on Linux, just use Wine (a quick google for "WoW Wine Guide" or "WoW Wine <Distro> guide" [replace <Distro> with your Distro] will bring back lots of useful pages and guides to do it; it's fairly simple and runs very well (I got ~30 fps faster on Gentoo than XP). As for programming things; there's a whole plethora of applications, one of the most common being KDevelop - an IDE for KDE: http://www.kdevelop.org/ There's a few IRC clients out there too: irssi is just an IRC client, Kopete is the KDE IM client, which can do MSN, Yahoo, IRC and a few more, and then there's Pidgin (formerly GAIM) which can do most IM protocols including IRC and MSN. VOIP you again have a large selection, Skype being the most common one, however there are others, like the ZFone project ( http://zfoneproject.com/ ) which allows for encrypting the VOIP stream (better encrypting than Skype I suppose I should say, since Skype is encrypted). Hope that helps you. Penguin