Well, the first thing to do to start is boot the live CD and find out how
well Trisquel works with your hardware. If something seems to not work, ask
here or on the #trisquel IRC channel and someone will probably help you find
out if it just doesn't work or if it can be made to work somehow, or if you
just didn't know how to use it properly.
You won't have much trouble with the installation itself; the worst that's
happened to me is causing a Windows XP partition to not be bootable after
sizing it down (this has only happened to me once, and only with Windows XP;
I imagine some sort of Windows utility would correct the problem if I had
it).
Regarding VoIP: there are a lot of VoIP programs that can replace Skype; what
you want depends on your needs. The major issue is Skype doesn't support any
standard protocols, just its own secret protocol, so you won't be able to use
any of them to communicate with Skype users; the people you want to
communicate with will have to also use some VoIP program other than Skype.
Anyway, some that I've heard of are Ekiga, Jitsi, Linphone, and Mumble, and I
know that Empathy supports VoIP as well. I don't know how good any of them
are because I don't use VoIP myself (though I've tested Mumble briefly), but
I'm sure someone else will have more to say about them.
One thing to keep in mind is that Adobe Flash is proprietary, so it is not
included in Trisquel. Websites are getting better at this, but some still
refuse to work without Flash. Trisquel ships with Gnash, which is compatible
with pretty much any Flash 8 and older stuff and also works with YouTube, but
very little else. With a lot of video sites, you can get around only
supporting Flash by using UnPlug (an Abrowser/Firefox extension), which
allows you to download the videos (or "open" them, which in practice causes
them to be streamed like an HTML5 video) or ViewTube (a Greasemonkey script),
which replaces the Flash-based video players on certain sites with an
HTML5/Javascript-based one. Disabling the Gnash plugin (called "Shockwave
Flash" in the list of plugins) can also help in some cases, because some
video players do support Javascript/HTML5-based fallback, but only use them
when Flash is unavailable.
Also, welcome!
