It's not a complete waste of a day, but it's close: I installed VMware on my Windows laptop, then set up a couple of virtual machines to test: Bodhi Linux and the latest Peppermint OS . Both are lightweight distributions based on Ubuntu. Both are minimal installations, that then take a little while to customize. Live CDs used to be the way I would take a look at a new distribution. But that process uses up CDs (and now DVDs), most of which I never look at again -- and Linux distributions change rapidly. The other problem with the Live CD is that you don't really know how easy it is to work with it until you've installed it. But nobody really wants to partition, install, and wipe out something that doesn't work. I played around with USB distro installs for awhile, but they didn't always work, and still require rebooting. Virtualization is the answer. You set up a software-only machine, just a file within your regular or "host" operating system. With...