max1220

Well, I really enjoy Geany as a text editor, and Visual Studio is great, when you have to do .NET

- Hopefully die I guess, they will focus more on the devices, and create a more "closed" hard/software connection. - Well, I think they will lose a lot of customers to Google. They are already everywhere, and it's so easy for them to "manipulate" the masses to use their OS in the future, that they properbly will - Well, I guess, I already answered that But Microsoft & Google aren't the only ones creating OS'es. Take a look at Ubuntu, for example. Or SteamOS. - The others were already to big. Think about the custmers: Why should they buy Windows Phones, which supports allmost no apps, when there are Android/iOS devices.

(Xu-/Lu-/U)buntu is great for beginners. It just works out of the box, even with more "complicated" setups, since it uses proprietary drivers nearly "by-default". RAID-Cards should be no problem, and even software-RAID's should work fine, after you RTFM'd in the ubuntu wiki Although I guess, canonical(The guys behind Ubuntu) are messing their system up quite badly atm... (mir/xmir, Unity, They spy-search-thing, ...) If you're willing to invest some time, use Debian(As live system GRML). It's not as easy as *buntu, but a great OS! I wouldn't recommend any of these more "exotic" distros like Pear OS and stuff, since you won't find much support for those anywhere. For gaming, you should install PlayOnLinux & Steam. For more productive work, you could use LibreOffice. It's a fork("clone") of OpenOffice, but more Libre! (It's basically the same...), and maybe geany if you're into coding/LaTeX/a good GUI text editor.

Couldn't you just use rsync/cp -R/somethingother to copy / from one to the other sd-card from your Computer? Shrinking partitions isn't a good idea, since it would take ages & wear the flash-chip in the SD-card quite a bit.